Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

[Asheesh Laroia <asheesh AT creativecommons.org>]

I'm reading through all the patches and documenting what happened to this 
code between 0.4 and 0.5 in a ChangeLog.  (I have no intention of keeping 
a full GNU-style ChangeLog since we have svn logs for that.)  It's been 
mostly a fun, rewarding, endearing, love-for-humanity-growing experience. 
That's true for all the committers - yay!  Let me be clear that I single 
out pmiller not because his work has been bad.

CODE STYLE

pmiller has committed an .indent.pro file to the source tree that switches 
us to GNU style indenting, which is fine.  Curiously, he sets --tab-size0 
rather than giving tabs a width > 0.  Why?  If there's no good reason, 
I'll just remove this line and stick with the GNU style default for tab 
width.

Further, I'll reindent the code base at some point to fully GNU style.

Further, pmiller has suggested we stick to C89 constructs.  I'm feeling 
generous today, so I'll consider that reasonable.  If we do want to stick 
to it, we should modify our compile process so that with GCC we used 
-std=c89 or -ansi so that the codebase does not compile with non-C89 
constructs.

API CHANGES

pmiller added:

char ** ll_license_get_publisher
char ** ll_license_get_creator

I suggest we remove these as per my earlier suggestion.  It's *crucial* 
that we document the named constants you can pass into ll_get_attribute() 
to make sure people don't forget about all the features we have, however. 
ll_license_get(LL_PUBLISHER, license_uri) would be the new way to do a 
call like that.

I still suggest shortening the named constants as much as they can bear, 
and then removing all the functions that are just trivial wrappers to the 
named constants.

That's all for now.  This is short; if you care, reply.

-- Asheesh.

--
Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else
follows in the same way.
                -- Alan J. Perlis