When I first started working on patches for tomcat several years ago, I
found their code standards quite extreme compared to my personal
preferences. As time has passed, I've come to appreciate their rules and
adopted many (not all) for my own projects.
As I've started working on jspwiki, I must confess to a feeling of shock
when seeing some of the classes for the first time. I'll even confess to
doing a "hatchet job" on 3 or 4 before I could feel comfortable reading
the code and exploring possible changes. Even debugging under netbeans
with a wide screen and small font can be difficult with so little actual
code visible at once.
I don't want to upset anyone who has worked hard on this project, but
what would be the reaction to some "clean up only" patches?
I'm thinking only of removing multiple spaces (inherited from tab
replacement, or just to align variables of different lengths), removing
trailing white space, removing unnecessary or confusing empty lines,
getting rid of /n between if and {, putting angle brackets around single
line if statements, that sort of thing.
If you all love it how it is, then I'll learn to do so too. On the other
hand, if tighter code is on your wish list, I'd be pleased to help when
working on a class for some other reason. If you already have a
checkstyle configuration that you'd like to converge on, I'd like to see it.
Sorry for shaking the tree!
Best intentions from...
Brian
