PLEASE READ: Whitespace rules

[Daniel J. Luke]

On Sep 7, 2007, at 3:44 PM, Kevin Ballard wrote:
> * Why have rules for Portfiles? Isn't that the maintainer's  
> prerogative?
>
> Yes it is, which is why I marked those rules as SHOULD rather than  
> MUST. Having consistent rules for Portfiles aids reading of Portfiles,

The majority of most portfiles consists of key value pair separated  
by some whitespace. Having tabs vs. soft tabs vs. spaces vs. whatever  
doesn't really effect the readability there.


... but we basically agree here, so I'll shut up about it.

> * Last time we decided that developers working on base/ code should  
> conform to the surrounding style.
>
> No we didn't. Last time one person loudly objected, and the  
> discussion eventually died without coming to any consensus.

Do you mean me as the loud objector? I know at least one other person  
agreed with me in the list discussion ;-)

We've had this discussion _many_ times in macports history.

> As it stands, every single time I edit base/ code I have to worry  
> about my tab settings and I frequently have to go back and re-tab  
> things to conform to the surrounding style simply to avoid  
> extraneous lines on the diff.

So to fix this, we can impose an arbitrary standard, or you could use  
diff -b ;-)

> * Shouldn't we have a vote on this?
>
> No we shouldn't. Every time we've tried to come to a consensus, the  
> issue has stalled. Therefore I'm going with a dictatorial approach  
> on this. The only way to get a good standard is to force it on  
> everybody, and we desperately need one.

macports has a set of friendly dictators who we elected to solve  
issues like this (portmgr). If they're convinced that this is the way  
to go, then that's probably good. It doesn't make sense for anyone  
who has commit on base/ to start dictating things to the rest of the  
volunteers, though.

> No, I said it was necessary. Voting is good, but voting didn't work  
> for whitespace,

because there wasn't a huge number of people who wanted to enforce  
strict whitespace last time? (ie, you didn't get consensus on the  
list ... probably because most people don't really care?)

> and we needed rules.

We had rules, you're arguing that we needed _different_ rules (which  
is fine).

--
Daniel J. Luke
+========================================================+
| *---------------- dluke at geeklair.net ----------------* |
| *-------------- http://www.geeklair.net -------------* |
+========================================================+
|   Opinions expressed are mine and do not necessarily   |
|          reflect the opinions of my employer.          |
+========================================================+


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PGP.sig
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 186 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-dev/attachments/20070907/644b46a8/PGP.bin