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