Subject: Re: [PATCH] CodingGuidelines: Add a section on writing documentation

From: Štěpán Němec <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 01 Nov 2010 18:00:02 +0100

Sverre Rabbelier <[email-masked]> writes:

> Heya,
>
> On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 04:54, Štěpán Němec <[email-masked]> wrote:
>> But given that it's only used as {0,2} at the two places right now
>> (disregarding occurences of "0{40}" in the documentation), I agree it
>> might be better to get rid of it, although I don't feel strongly about
>> it. Any other opinions?
>
> Let's get rid of it for now, we can always resurrect it later if we
> have a need for it.

OK.

>> I thought about this already when preparing the recent unification
>> series, and came to the conclusion "no, there shouldn't". :-) As the
>> examples you give show, the current usage is inconsistent, but given
>> that it brings no semantic ambiguity, I don't think it is a problem. You
>> could find more similar cosmetic inconsistencies and I don't think it
>> makes much sense to mandate any rules for such things. (But again, I
>> don't feel _too_ strongly about this either, so if more people think
>> it's worth it, I can prepare a patch that unifies them and mention the
>> preference in CodingGuidelines.)
>
> Perhaps we can set a standard to do it, but just leave the existing
> cases as is (to prevent unneeded churn)? That way we'll eventually
> converge on something.

Hm... that seems like the worst solution to me -- if we do end up
standardizing this after all, any occurence of non-standard usage would
be a bug that needs fixing (think about it from the POV of a new
contributor who reads CodingGuidelines but sees the actual usage being
different).

I guess it wouldn't be so much of a code churn to unify the spacing, but
I'm still not convinced we should be enforcing this kind of thing.

Štěpán