Hello Carsten,
On Dec 18, 2007, at 15:16 , Carsten Ziegeler wrote:
I think we shouldn't make not a big fuzz about this, but I think we
should reconsider our coding standard for import statements.
My idea is to use a quick vote where people just state their
preference
for this thing. After the vote is finished, we just use the choice of
the majority - no vetos, no discussions etc. To change the coding
standard we need at least three votes for the proposed way.
If you don't mind, I do have a comment about this quick vote. Let me
start by stating that I think that coding standards are important. In
fact, I was one of the people who pushed for them and came up with the
draft for the first version of the document.
However, I think the real discussion we should have is about
formatting source code. Do we want to somehow make sure all code is
formatted exactly the same? Does this mean we need to standardize on a
single IDE or a separate formatting tool?
I think that is the issue we ran into. You changed some existing code
and reformatted using your IDE. Richard does not always use Eclipse
and interprets the current coding standard a bit different from you
(and, to be honest, Richard's explanation of what's currently in the
standard seems okay to me, although I must admit the current wording
is not that exact... perhaps even deliberately ;) ).
I don't mind voting on this issue, but my next question would be, are
you now going to checkout all code, do an "organize imports" on all
files, and commit that back? This is not only related to organizing
imports, but to other things mentioned in the coding style too (naming
of variables, spacing, indentation, ...).
If we are not going to actively keep formatting code, then we should
probably pay more attention towards preserving as much as possible the
style of the existing code. That then means you can never "format" or
"organize imports" (I use Eclipse lingo here because that's what I
use, but I'm sure NetBeans, IDEA and even vi have similar concepts).
Perhaps this is the time to discuss this further and see if we can
reach some kind of consensus on the issue.
Greetings, Marcel
