Lots of good replies in this thread. I just wanted to follow up on my suggestion from earlier and give some insight as to why I suggested this:
The _only_ reason I really suggested a hard enforcement is because, roughly speaking, maintaining code is roughly ~infinitely more expensive than actually writing it. Abiding by a column limit, if enforced, seems really really trivial to many people and very stupid to reject a patch over. But it is far more useful to the tons of people who may read it later, because the labor balance is asymmetrical. The author of a patch must spend some amount of effort N writing it, where N is roughly linear in the size of the change. But the 'maintenance effort' for that patch is, instead, at least linear in the _lifetime of the project_. Basically: code is very cheap, but maintenance is extremely costly. All that said, I'm not going to lose sleep over this, and it's not a stylistic hill that's worth dying on. And again, if GHC only had a few occurrences of this, it would be easier to fix, but that's not the case, and hampers contributors a bit. If anything, a more pressing stylistic concern is our odd naming scheme that has very little consistency, and that does make it harder to find and read things I think. :) On Mon, Nov 9, 2015 at 3:15 PM, Austin Seipp <aus...@well-typed.com> wrote: > Something like this might be possible. It'd just require implementing > a new arcanist linter, I think, and enabling it in .arclint > > In general I really sympathize with this. The problem 90% of people > hit is that they touch a line that was *already* over 80 columns, so > 'arc lint' warns them and gets annoyed, but they don't want to fix or > split up a bunch of stuff to avoid it. It's an issue of having to do > 'boring work' which nobody likes, and seems very tedious, regardless > of the mechanism of how they do the change. > > Really, I'm more inclined to begin a policy of rejecting reviews that > do not pass the linter. Exceptions can be made, but in general we need > to start *enforcing it* with the red button I think. And it would > require us to be more diligent about merging patches quickly to reduce > the scope of merge conflicts (because fixing an 80col violation > normally, almost always, adds more LOC). > > However, there are people who in general think the contribution > barrier is already too high, and I fear that enforcing this with a > hard rule may make people 'give up' because it seems like a pointless > thing to mandate to block their changes. I'm not sure how people feel > about that, but it is worth keeping in mind the developer economics. > > I hope suggesting the possibility of being more forceful against 80col > violations doesn't derail this too much. :) > > On Mon, Nov 9, 2015 at 3:02 PM, Richard Eisenberg <e...@cis.upenn.edu> wrote: >> Hi devs, >> >> We seem to be uncommitted to the ideal of 80-character lines. Almost every >> patch on Phab I look through has a bunch of "line too long" lint errors. No >> one seems to do much about these. And Phab's very very loud indication of a >> lint error makes reviewing the code harder. >> >> I like the ideal of 80-character lines. I aim for this ideal in my patches, >> falling short sometimes, of course. But I think the current setting of >> requiring everyone to "explain" away their overlong lines during `arc diff` >> and then trying hard to ignore the lint errors during code review is wrong. >> And it makes us all inured to more serious lint errors. >> >> How about this: after `arc diff` is run, it will count the number of >> overlong lines before and after the patch. If there are more after, have the >> last thing `arc diff` outputs be a stern telling-off of the dev, along the >> lines of >> >>> Before your patch, 15 of the edited lines were over 80 characters. >>> Now, a whopping 28 of them are. Can't you do better? Please? >> >> Would this be ignored more or followed more? Who knows. But it would sure be >> less annoying. :) >> >> What do others think? >> >> Thanks, >> Richard >> _______________________________________________ >> ghc-devs mailing list >> ghc-devs@haskell.org >> http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs >> > > > > -- > Regards, > > Austin Seipp, Haskell Consultant > Well-Typed LLP, http://www.well-typed.com/ -- Regards, Austin Seipp, Haskell Consultant Well-Typed LLP, http://www.well-typed.com/ _______________________________________________ ghc-devs mailing list ghc-devs@haskell.org http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs
