Source Mage code commit list

[Jeremy Blosser <jblosser-smgl AT firinn.org>]

On Oct 31, Vlad Glagolev [stealth AT sourcemage.org] wrote:
> > It's not useless chars to many people, and it's been common practice for a
> > very long time.
> 
> Have you ever heard about some sweet term -- "clean code" ?
> And let those "many people" prove that it's really "common practice for a
> very long time".

Don't be disingenuous.  The issue is quite obviously that different people
have different notions of what is clean for shell code.  And no, the rest
of this distro does not have an obligation to prove to you that what has
been in these spells for years is "common practice".  These are how spells
are formatted, and there are a lot of them.  I don't need to prove to you
that 2+2=4.

> Neither me, no other devs/users (you can ask them on IRC or read theirs
> answers @ MLs) want to go through the jungles of spaces to change/fix
> something in code.

Fine.  To be absolutely fair, I have now read every reply to every commit
you've made since Nov 07.  You may wish I had not--there is a disturbing
frequency of people replying to your commits with issues or questions, and
you not responding.  I did not take the time to check all the spells in
question to see if you fixed the issues and just didn't say anything, but
given the number of recurring comments about the same issues, you probably
don't want me to check into that either.

What I definitely did not see is any pattern of people agreeing with you on
formatting.  In fact I didn't find one reply on the commits list in support
of it.  I did find several places where people asked you to stop.

The first time it's mentioned is here:
https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/sm-commit/2007-November/thread.html#13648
and the responses are all in the direction of the same thing we are telling
you now, a year later.  You didn't bother to reply to that thread.

We also have:
https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/sm-commit/2008-July/017821.html
which points out why it's not correct to just remove quotes on variable
references, and:

https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/sm-commit/2008-July/018007.html
which makes it quite senior developers don't want you making these changes
in the spells they have historically maintained.


I also checked SM-Discuss, but the only relevant thread I found is this:
https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/sm-discuss/2008-July/018468.html
which ends without anything like a final decision, though the consensus
from the leads posting there is pretty clearly to leave things as they have
been--without formal standards, and letting people work as they need to in
the files they're creating or sections/spells they are taking over.

This is good summary post:
https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/sm-discuss/2008-July/018491.html


I did not go through all my IRC logs but I don't expect to find a different
sentiment there given the percentage of leads that have already weighed in
on this, and who they are.  You have heard from the people that have the
most into this distro and they have quite clearly told you to stop doing
this.

> Since we've not been having the strict rules for formatting, I can't do 
> this:
> > Please don't do this anymore.

Yes, you can, it's quite simple: stop doing it.  Not having formal
formatting rules does NOT mean any individual developer can make himself a
tyrant and change everything to the format he likes.  It means we don't
demand a specific style of people--and neither do you.  It means loose
consensus is good enough, and we have that, but you are violating it.
Repeatedly.

> > Yes, I'd prefer you revert that commit and redo it with just the 
> > functional
> > changes included instead of all the formatting changes.
> 
> By saying "fix" I didn't mean "revert", I meant "FIX". Fix the problem I
> made with that commit - align the lines and cut theirs length to 80
> chars.

As PL I am saying that these informal standards are to be respected as much
as is reasonable and possible:

1) Do not make significant formatting changes along with actual fixes in
the same commit, where "significant" means the changes are on lines that
would not be changed as part of the real fix.

2) Leave formatting in spells and sections as you find them until you have
done enough work in those spells or sections to be generally recognized
(officially or unofficially) as the senior maintainer of those spells or
sections.

If you continue to work outside these guidelines, expect your commits to be
revertered for you at the discretion of Leads and other senior developers
who have better ways to spend their time than trying to review commits with
excessive noise in them or redoing formatting in their own spells to what
they prefer.


If you or anyone else doesn't like this, I'd recommend a discussion on the
list of other ideas until another proposal has enough definition to make a
formal proposal and call for a real vote.  Given the comments made so far,
though, I am reasonably confident I'm merely stating what the general
consensus already is and would prefer we just move on.


Alternately, if Arwed disagrees and wants to state another policy (and
lacking a vote of the developers to the contrary) I as always will defer to
him with respect to code in his component.

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