[RFC] CodingStyle

Rob Landley rob at landley.net
Thu Feb 23 20:33:32 UTC 2006


On Thursday 23 February 2006 2:33 pm, Andy Green wrote:
> Jason Schoon wrote:
> >     agreed ... so much that i think we should note this in the style
> > guide
>
> I, Joe "No Code In Busybox Yet" Random, happen to disagree, but what is
> such a minor point doing in a style guide anyway?  It is nothing but
> personal taste and each new rule makes it harder for people to
> contribute.  Why not specify only general testable goals for style,
> like, "has to compile on gcc 4.02 without funny switches or warnings"
> and stick with the most general compatability-driven demands like 4-char
> tabs.

My problem is that if the maintainers of individual applets get hit by a bus, 
abducted by aliens, or simply lose interest, I'm going to wind up maintaining 
their code until I can find some other sucker to pawn it off on.

And the thing about maintaining other people's code is that it's not important 
whether or not you could have written that code, it's important whether or 
not you can _read_ it.

Rewriting large sections of code just because that's the only way I could 
learn what it does is something I had to painfully outgrow.  It means I wind 
up maintaining that code in future.  I've got enough on my plate right now, 
and future plans for plenty more already queued up...

(One of the reasons I like busybox is that the applets are small and 
self-contained.  I can read the sucker, come up to speed on it in an hour, 
and then forget about it.  I'd like to _minimize_ the required amount of 
familiarity with the codebase in order to mangle it.  And document the shared 
infrastructure like applets/ and libbb/.)

> -Andy

Rob
-- 
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.



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