+1 on not suffocating developers with too many style rules. Though I believe indentation is fundamental enough to have it as a rule. Checkstyle sounds good as well.
Reading Arup's response it seems he has volunteered to reformat all the existing files. Are we ok with that? -Francis On 9/5/12 4:32 PM, "Travis Crawford" <[email protected]> wrote: >Recently we took the first step towards a more consistent coding style >in HCATALOG-486, where we added a small number of check style rules, >and the associated reformat to make the checks pass. There's a balance >between enforcing lots of style rules vs. annoying developers that we >need to be mindful of, and find the balance that works for us. > >There are some guidelines listed in the wiki here, which clearly state >4-space indentation. That said, I see a lot of classes use 2-space >indentation, and I'm certainly guilty of using 2-spaces for new files >I've added because I like that better. But really we should follow the >style rules instead of imposing our preferences. > > >https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/HCATALOG/HowToContribute#HowTo >Contribute-MakingChanges > >If we do want to move towards enforcing consistent indentation I think >there's a lot of risk of accidental issues by simply doing a bulk >reformat. Instead we might: > >- add a checkstyle rule that requires 4 space indentations >- exclude all the existing files from the rule > >Over time if someone wants to spend the time we can reformat existing >files as no-op changes, and remove the files from the exclude list. > >Thoughts? I think moving towards a consistent style is important but >hope we can find a good balance between letting people code the way >they like to vs. imposing lots of rules. > >--travis > > > >On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 3:57 PM, Chris Drome <[email protected]> wrote: >> I had commented to Francis about this a couple of weeks ago. >> >> It seems like the Alan Gates specified 4 spaces, but some contributors >>are >> using 2 spaces instead. >> >> >> On 9/5/12 3:55 PM, "Arup Malakar" <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>>Hi, >>> >>>I see that some of the classes (~81 classes) in the codebase use 2 >>>spaces for indentation. Rest >>>of the codebase (~67 classes) use 4 spaces for indentation. Having a >>>consistent coding style makes >>>it easier to read as well to change the code. >>> >>>If we agree on having a consistent style I can create a JIRA and take >>>a stab at changing the classes >>>to use the same indention. Also, in that case what should be the >>>standard, 2 or 4 spaces? >>> >>>Thanks, >>>Arup >>
