Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 9 Oct 2009, at 13:03, Felix Holmgren wrote:

> > While I sympathize with David who prefers (or is used) to some  
> > other coding
> > style,
> > the GNUstep project needs a consistent coding style and the GNU  
> > coding
> > standard
> > are as good a choice as any.  Since GNUstep is a GNU project, it's  
> > a natural
> > choice.
>
> Given that part of the aim of GNUstep is to track Cocoa, might it not
> make sense to use the Apple coding guidelines for everything that's
> written in Objective-C?
>
> http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/CodingGuidelines/CodingGuidelines.html

Those guidelines ARE pretty much consistently used in GNUstep.  The  
coding style issues we are probably talking about here are those to do  
with the use of:

indentation
brackets
white-space

Generally, whenever someone comes along and complains about the style  
used, they have their own 'good reasons'  why their style is preferred/ 
justified.  Certainly, when I started working on the GNUstep project,  
my style was very different from the GNU style, and I could have  
provided reasons why my style was better :-)

None of those arguments carry any weight whatsoever ... because there  
are always plenty of people with other preferred styles and their own  
reasons for using them.

We use the GNU style almost solely because of the value of consistency  
(the fact that we are a GNU project probably explains why it was  
originally chosen) ... once you are used to it, you can work on any  
part of the code without finding the style hard to read.

While there are a few 'religious' people who are convinced that  
everyone else should adopt their style, almost everyone accepts that a  
consistent standard is useful and that any attempt to change the  
style, once adopted, would be severely counterproductive.