These are kinda ad hoc based on the recent work we've been doing. (1) Avoid major formatting or whitespace changes that only affect the appearance of the code. That is, don't change spacing or indentation in massive amounts, especially if you're not the primary author of the code. The primary reason for this is that the diffs from SVN commits become vastly less informative. For those of you who use an editor that thinks its smart and automatically reformats code, please turn off those features.
(2) As a corollary to (1), try to conform to the coding style of the module you're working on. Yes, I prefer that you use MY coding style, but other maintainers have used different styles in their own modules. If you're going to make a change to someone's code, bear in mind that THEY have to maintain it. Please maximize their ability to do so. (3) No tab characters. I'm not going to be overly picky as to how many spaces you use to indent (hint: I prefer 4), but for those whose editors want to be "smart" about changing X number of spaces to tabs, please turn that feature off. Different people have their editors configured with different tab stops, and the result can be a mess when different people edit the same code with on different settings. We can discuss this a little, but I don't want things to get too complicated. Just keep in mind that collaboratively-written code is more likely to fall victim to the effects of entropy, and we have to fight that. -- Timothy Normand Miller http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~millerti Open Graphics Project _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
