Grammar and style police are everywhere! This week are they shooting themselves in the foot over some totally trivial and meaningless extra characters somewhere on a line? Is it a case of "#TriviaDoesntMatter"?
AFAICT the limitations on line lengths are are ANCIENT holdovers from days of fixed lenght cards and glass-teletypes. Totally meaningless in today's terminal emulator in GUIs world. It is certainly laudable to keep text block widths reasonable. It is fact that it is easier to read text at 6 or 7 inches wide versus more than 8 inches. BUT, it is also clear that a *consistent* style is easier to read instead of needlessly varying styles in one document. As for "being hesitant to touch anything anymore"... Practically all of the FOSS projects have adopted rather stringent and ridiculuous requirements that programmers and other have to jump through hoops (of flame?) to prove their qualifications to do anything. Gentoo is maybe one of the more conservative about having to go through the motions in oder to qualify as a "developer" and, personally, I no longer have the time or inclination (at my age of 62) to do so, just so that my 50+ years of programming and typing can be subject to the arbitrary rules. I don't expect to be granted free access to the code base without some oversight, but a code review by one or more others before a commit would/should be more than adequate to exclude bugs and blunders from being introduced. Over the years I have done much for the FOSS movement, and I have posted some small tools and scripts that some may find usefull, and where possible I contribute via bugzilla. I much prefer Gentoo as a platform since it is still committed to allowing the users to make significant choices about the environment instead of imposing "one way" policies as some other projects have done. But seeing this little tempest merely convinces me that some folks still don't get the point that some things of a substative nature (such as correctness and choice) are of more importance than other things (like "style" or options.) Also, avoiding idiosyncratic changes that have unforseen or un-intended consequences should be coordinated with others before introduction to a stable system. -- G.Wolfe Woodbury redwo...@gmail.com
