On 04/22/2016 12:21 PM, Bernd Schmidt wrote: > (Apologies if you get this twice, the mailing list didn't like the > html attachment in the first attempt). > > We frequently get malformatted patches, and it's been brought to my > attention that some people don't even make the effort to read the GNU > coding standards before trying to contribute code. TL;DR seems to be > the excuse, and while I find that attitude inappropriate, we could > probably improve the situation by spelling out the most basic rules > in an abridged document on our webpages. Below is a draft I came up > with. Thoughts?
Despite the comments downthread, I think that abridged versions of longish standards documents are always a good idea. They need to be maintained, usually reactively, and that's fine. It gives a new contributor something to read that's short enough to provide the salient points for an initial patch/review cycle. The point is to get better incrementally. Nobody is ever perfect the first time. I especially like that Jason caught on that your document is actually *more* than just the GNU Coding Standard, and that where the standard is underspecified the projects have their own conventions. For examples just look at: https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/Style_and_Conventions However, in the end, I think that yet-another-document is not the solution we want. What we actually need is a program that just formats your source according to the GNU Coding Style and that way you can always tell your users "Run indent" and be done with it. The output of such a program should always be considered correct, and if it's not, we should fix it immediately. Why can't we use indent? If we can't use indent, what do we need to solve this problem? At the end of the day I never want to see another comment about code formatting because the user used X and X always formats code correctly. -- Cheers, Carlos.
