[MPlayer-dev-eng] Offer of help to get me started

[D Richard Felker III]

On Mon, Mar 24, 2003 at 12:11:40AM +0000, Evil Kosh wrote:
> Hello Rich,
> 
> no, I'm not trolling the list, I'm serious.  IMHO I started to read the

Sorry then. With a name like "Evil" you had me a bit suspicious.

> source and found that people were using spaces here, tabs there,
> sometimes the brace would be after the if/switch/for statement on the
> same line, others would have it below, others wouldnt have one at all.

And all are perfectly readable if you're remotely competent with C.

And if you're not competent with C you should not be writing code
since it will be full of bugs.

> like I've said, the linux kernel has a style guide and it helps
> enormously.  People can read it, produce code according to it and
> submit, there are no issues with style or hacking, everyone knows what
> to expect and what the official line is.

That's nice. I agree totally with Linux's style and use it myself, but
I disagree totally with trying to reformat everyone's code to meet
some arbitrary standard like that.

> It's like taking the personal touch away from code and trying to be
> professional about it, without trying to say you are not being
> unprofessional.  If everyone is allowed to just hack what they like,
> they will do so and eventually the code is spaghetti.

That has nothing to do with formatting style. And personally I have no
wish to be 'professional' if it means behaving like some idiotic
proprietary software house with all their coding rules, metrics,
reviews, etc. crap.

> I am offering to update the code with a style, which can then be updated
> by you guys too which will give us all what we want.  It doesnt cost you
> anything does it?

Yes, it costs flexibility and pollutes the cvs logs. Read the archives
for past discussions of this. It's much more complicated than you'd
think at first.

> It helps people like me, who want to help, but find the code hard to
> read and eventually give up.  By doing this, I can help, improve the
> quality of the code layout and possibly could help more people to
> contrbute by removing this (invisible)barrier.
>
> I'm not trying to be a bastard, or start fights, I'm simply trying to
> help in a way that I can.

If you want to *help* with the project, then write useful code that
does something. Reformatting to try to 'beautify' the source is not
coding, it's just a huge waste of time. Like Arpi has said, there are
programs that can do that for you. If you are simply unable to read
the source as it is (most likely this means you have a broken text
editor with tabwidth!=8), then reformat your local copy with the
indent program while working on it.

Rich