On Wednesday 14 June 2006 09:52, SAKUMA Junichi wrote: > In the meeting they talked about harshness in particular about coding > styles. Suppose a beginner gets up the nerve and submits his or her > first patch to an OSS developers list. Instead of praising his or her > spirits, OSS gurus in the list will gang up on the beginner about his > or her coding style - unsophisticated logic, naming convention, and > on top of that, indentation!
this varies wildly from project to project ... some projects are very good about this and some (many?), as you note, are not. =/ it's also somewhat understandable: for many projects, coding style is very important to keeping the code maintanable, and some cultures are simply more brusk than others in their communication. i wonder what could help here ... it's probably a herculean task to change the status quo in newbie-unfriendly projects. one might say "let natural selection do its thing and friendly projects will gather more contributors and therefore out-develop the unfriendly projects" but that's probably an overly simplistic view of the competition landscape and certainly loses us new contributors in the meantime. i wonder if new contributors would bother to read a "checklist for submitting a patch" if they knew such a thing existed. it would cover things like "have i tested the patch locally?" (yes, sometimes not even that happens =) and "does my code use the same indentation style as the rest of the file(s) it alters?" ... sort of as a way to prep new contributors as to what the expectations tend to be and therefore remove some of the friction that arises when the project's expectations are different from (and therefore not met by) the new contributor. this brings us back to a developer portal =) -- Aaron J. Seigo Undulate Your Wantonness GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43 Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
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