I come down with Thiago here. From a contributor's perspective, generated code is bad enough. However, if I have patch that I'm preparing to submit a pull request/code review for, and the project re-generates existing code, you've just made my patch likely unmergeable or even impossible to submit.
The fact that projects DO sometimes re-generate code always makes me incredibly tentative to even try to modify generated code (even if they DON'T regenerate). I've only submitted a very small amount to open source projects and have been burned in the past, so I guess its a 'once bitten twice shy' kinda thing. If this project made it a habit of ever regenerating code, it would definitely scare off developers. On Tue, 2015-01-27 at 15:40 -0200, Thiago Macieira wrote: > On Tuesday 27 January 2015 15:25:16 Lankswert, Patrick wrote: > > Thiago, > > > > I am not sure that we are disagreeing. I see only one public form, the > > contributed code. > > > > Consider the case, that I contribute a bundle of source that may or may not > > come from a code generator. If I contribute more source, does it matter > > whether it came from a generator or from hand? I do not think so, no matter > > where there code came from, it is my responsibility to make the source code > > as a contribution suitable for submission. If that means merging it with > > and preserving all of the other contributions that were made since my last > > contributions, that is what I must do. > > > > In the above scenario, the tool is irrelevant, yes? > > The difference is what you're modifying and whether you're following the > spirit > of the definition. > > For example, if I use my IDE to generate the skeleton of a new class, even > though they're generated, the new files are the preferred form of > modification. > I won't regenerate them again. But I am allowed to use the tool again to > generate more new classes. > > Similarly for us, we can use the tool again to generate new code, but we > cannot use the tool to update the sources that were contributed before. That > would be, at least, a violation of the spirit of the Open Source Definition > and > is probably enough to get us kicked out of Debian package repositories. > > So I am recommending a hardline stance on this: it's ok to generate once, but > then no one uses the tool again on the same files. >
