[Fwd: Re: Indention - why spaces?]
Quoted 3 lines · Larry McVoy
By the way, this sort of thing is a big deal around here, I spend a lot of time getting people to do it all the same way. It's worth it.
Larry, you can save yourself a lot of trouble, time and money: Create an indent configuration file and tell your people to use it. That is exactly why indent was written many years ago.
Better still, change your commit scripts to automatically run indent when checking files in. This works on private projects - it is not recommended for a public project like GNU/Linux, unless, Linus would call a halt - indent all files and then carry on, which I'm sure he won't do, since it is waaaay too much trouble.
With indent, everybody can be happy: You don't like the curly braces here but rather want them there? ==> Run indent on your private copy.
BTW, occational windoze users can get the GUIfied 'windent.exe' off my web site at www.aerospacesoftware.com. This presents a simple way to play around with indent; to figure out exactly what schtooopidttt switches you need to make the code look the way your SQA dork wants...
Also, if you want the whole kernel to be commented and clickable in html, 'doxygen' does an amazing job with that, even though the kernel code is not written with doxygen tags.
Since I discovered these two tools, I totally relaxed about code formatting, since it is simply not an issue anymore.
Cheers,
Signature · 1 line
Herman
Quoted 3 lines
Larry, you can save yourself a lot of trouble, time and money: Create an indent configuration file and tell your people to use it. That is exactly why indent was written many years ago.
Indent is fine as a first pass, it doesn't handle everything properly. If it did, I think I would have figured it out by now. And no, I'm not going to go fix indent, I looked at the problems and the fixes and decided to pass. Some of them just aren't worth fixing in indent.
Besides, I really don't believe in giving people crutches, I believe in teaching them what it is I want and why. That tends to stick.
Signature · 2 lines
--- Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitmover.com/lm
I found that if you force people to use indent, by hooking it into the CVS commit script, they end up writing the code so that it looks exactly right and indent ends up doing nothing. Somehow people also manage to learn what not to do, so that indent doesn't screw up!
The trouble with indent is that many combinations of switches causes it to screw up royally. The documentation is also bad and outright wrong in some cases. Once you managed to find a workable set of switches, it is mostly OK. The few glitches are nothing to worry about, but to find the sweet spot can be tiresome. However, once you got a proper config file that works for you, all your troubles are over, so it is worth while experimenting with it a bit.
Quoted 11 lines · Larry McVoy
Quoted 3 lines
Larry, you can save yourself a lot of trouble, time and money: Create an indent configuration file and tell your people to use it. That is exactly why indent was written many years ago.
Indent is fine as a first pass, it doesn't handle everything properly.
If it did, I think I would have figured it out by now. And no, I'm
not going to go fix indent, I looked at the problems and the fixes and decided to pass. Some of them just aren't worth fixing in indent.Besides, I really don't believe in giving people crutches, I believe in teaching them what it is I want and why. That tends to stick.