On Thu, Jun 04, 2009 at 09:43:36PM -0400, Nick Holland wrote:
> Aaron W. Hsu wrote:
> > Hey all,
> >
> > I've been planning on doing some hacking on nvi in the tree, but I
> > wanted to play around with style(9) first. Am I correct in assuming
> > that KNF style is preferred for all code in the tree?
> >
>
> yes, but...
> when you see developers doing KNF commits, they aren't doing it as the
> end goal, they are doing it as part of "I'm looking over this code for
> any possible error I can find...oh, there's a KNF error, might as well
> fix that while I'm here".
>
> The idea of following style(9) is to help make reading the code easier,
> and that's the goal: to have the code READ. Not "to be ABLE to read
> the code some day", but to make sure that the code was actively and
> carefully read and checked.
>
> Changing the whitespace in the source code doesn't improve OpenBSD.
> Reading the code is what makes the improvement. If all you are doing
> is a mechanical KNFing, please don't. If you aren't finding OTHER
> errors while reading code, just keep reading, not changing.
>
> (Devs: feel free to jump all over me if I'm wrong here, working on an
> article in the FAQ along these lines... :)
One other thing you need to consider: does the code in question need
to be diffed with another repository, upstream or other BSD, for
example. In the case of nvi it is. Whitescpae and formatting diffs
make it hard to track and merge changes from other places.
-Otto
