Kathey Marsden wrote:
Rick Hillegas wrote:
I don't want to stop the vote if we can avoid it. However, I have
some misgivings that we may not agree on what we're approving.
Everyone may be hearing what they want to hear.
I see what you are saying about folks hearing what they want to hear.
Clarity is the key goal of Derby's coding standards. The coding
guidelines at
http://java.sun.com/docs/codeconv/html/CodeConvTOC.doc.html are a
style primer, not a law book. Mine this document for good examples
but use your common sense. Feel free to disregard any advice which is
religious in nature or which would make your code brittle. Above all
else, write clearly.
I don't think this wording would bring us into compliance with the db
project guidelines that we have a "well-defined convention" and
would create a state without a general agreed upon direction where we
are bound to have countless discussions about code formatting
"religion" as you put it. We need an agreed upon base color for our
shed. If as folks are painting they feel the need to vary a bit that
does not interfere with the general color scheme, add trim etc, that
is reasonable, but we don't want to go back to a state where we
encourage everyone to grab a can of whatever color paint they want and
start painting and repainting, running colors into each other and have
to debate about it.
Just want to make sure we have realistic expectations for this vote:
Since we are not bulk-reformatting the code, even after this vote Derby
won't conform to the db project guidelines.
The guidelines don't specify how extensive the hard-and-fast rules have
to be. To date, here are the only ones I think we have discussed
extensively:
1) No tabs.
2) Indentation stops set at 4 spaces.
3) Line length not to exceed 80 characters.
To this, with the community's approval, I would add
0) Write clearly.
A good enough coding standard would be these 4 hard-and-fast rules plus
a pointer to a non-binding style primer. Let's keep it simple and focus
on the issues which actually bothered us.
Regards,
-Rick
Kathey
