[webkit-dev] Should we ever change style guidelines?

[Peter Kasting]

On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 3:42 PM, Adam Treat <treat at kde.org> wrote:

> Pedantry over trivial issues wastes time.
>

But even what is trivial is a judgement call.  In general people don't
disagree about issues where they believe disagreement is a waste of time.

> A major problem: as you already noted, my common sense and yours disagree.
>
> And that is only a problem when we are disagreeing about non-trivial
> issues.
> The indentation of case labels I believe is a relatively trivial issue.


And I don't.  Who is right?  More importantly, how will you prevent us from
starting this debate on a bug?

And I
> would cite the already noted inconsistency of the current codebase


It's well-established that (a) not enforcing past rules as well as we're
doing now and (b) changing rules without changing the whole codebase to
comply contribute to this.  Existing inconsistency is not evidence that
inconsistency is fine, or even desirable.

> I have been on many bugs already where precisely
> > this happened.  It was a fiasco.
>
> I think you overstate.


Wasting a few dozen comments arguing the same issue with the same people in
several different bugs is correctly termed a "fiasco" in my opinion.  By
contrast the numerous bugs I've seen where authors promptly corrected style
violations in their patches and reposted them have gone quite smoothly.

> I don't see that at all.  What I see is us actually noticing style
> > violations instead of having them slip under the radar.
>
> Knowledge is good.  How you act on that knowledge is another matter.


And we are continually moving more in the direction of automating and
streamlining these actions so that patch authors get feedback as quickly and
consistently as possible and reviewers don't have to bother thinking about
things like this.  That seems like a good direction to me.

PK
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