[Insight-developers] Re: Review Directory : Coding Style Problems

[Bill Hoffman]

Gaetan Lehmann wrote:
> On Thu, 25 Jan 2007 17:26:40 +0100, Stephen R. Aylward 
> <Stephen.Aylward at Kitware.com> wrote:
>
> Does "consistent line lengths" mean "80 characters" ?
> If "many filters already have lines that are too long", perhaps is 
> there a reason ?
>
> Again, I can't understand the reaction of the itk core developers to a 
> proposition which is everything but stupid. Roughly, all what I get is 
> "it's like that" (Bill), a huge exageration of what I'm proposing to 
> demonstrate that's a bad idea (Luis), and "we'll force you to go 
> against what you proposed" (Stephen). Again I'm wasting my time trying 
> to communicate with a wall.
>
> It seem I'm not allowed to propose anything - a strange way to manage 
> a community -, so please go ahead, add all the commit check you want.
> In that conditions, I'm not sure I will care of fixing the line 
> lengths of a file to fix a bug - it may be a bug fix lost.
You can propose what you want, but when there is a decision made, then 
please honor it.  Code style almost a religious type thing.   I think we 
all agree that a consistent style, is a good thing.  It allows a large 
open source project to remain consistent from file to file even with 
lots of authors.  Now getting people to agree on a style is difficult. 
There are arguments for and against almost any style rule.   However, 
just because we can't all agree on a style, or "convert" people to 
thinking that our way is the best, does not mean that we should give up 
on style rules for the code.   We have a vote, and the keepers of ITK 
decide, and when that decision  is made, we all live with it, like or not.

The commit check obviously should not be put in place until the code 
base passes the style check.   Commits should not be done to fix two 
things at the same time.   If however, the commit check had been done 
from day one, all of this discussion would not be taking place.   There 
would be no code that exceeds the line length selected.   So, at some 
point someone will sweep the code, and fix all the line lengths, and 
only at that point will an commit checks be added.

-Bill