[webkit-dev] Comments in the code (Was Please include function-level comments in change log entries)

[Adam Klein]

On Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 9:51 AM, Ryosuke Niwa <rniwa at webkit.org> wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 9:30 AM, Yaar Schnitman <yaar at chromium.org> wrote:
>
>> [(dev time of maintaining comments) + (risk of outdated comments causing
>> bugs X dev time of fixing resulting bugs)] << (dev time gained by more
>> contributors each being more knowledgable)
>>
>> No?
>>
>
> How did you reach such a conclusion? Do you have any data points to
> support that?
>

Not sure about data points, but anecdotally I've noticed it's common
practice in WebKit to point newbies at particular contributors for
explanations of how things work (e.g., "oh, selection? that's tricky, ask
rniwa"). It seems plausible that some of the overhead of "oral tradition"
could be reduced by judicious application of comments (as well as other
written documentation, of course, like Dave Hyatt's blog posts and various
wiki pages).

- Adam
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