Hi, all I found myself with some free time this weekend, so I'm trying to do some more hacking. In particular, I'm again trying to get images in the "View in new window" window to be color-managed. While doing some preliminary reading, it suddenly dawned on me that some of the lines in geeqie are _really long_. I mean, unmanageably so.
Geeqie already has the beginnings of a set of coding standards, that being CODING in the root of the source tree, but I think we need to extend it some I will refer to this screen-shot below: [1] http://ocaml.xvm.mit.edu/~xsdg/stuff/geeqie/geeqie_typedefs.h.png Here are some initial thoughts/suggestions: #1) Limit line length to 100 characters I think 100 characters is a nice balance between (not needing a huge editor to view the code) and (not forcing every other line of code to be split across multiple lines). It's what we use at work and it seems to work very well. For reference, the visible right margin in [1] is at 100 characters. #2) We need to get rid of tabs as an acceptable form of whitespace Yes, switching will be painful. But ever since people started telling their editors to use 4-character or 2-character tabstops, tabs have become more pain than they're worth. This is especially evident when people try to align code or comments written with one setting, and other people try to view them with an editor set to some different setting. This is clearly visible in [1], and it's ugly and hard to read (see lines 369, 375, and 380 for one example; 383–387 for another). As a replacement, I would suggest using 4 spaces per level of indentation. I find that 4 spaces is wide enough that it's easy to visually track over long vertical distances (2 spaces is not), but is also not so wide so as to make it painful to write code 4-levels-deep (which is one problem with 8-space tabs). #3) Set some guidelines for comment appearance Should people use // or /*...*/ for single-line comments that appear on their own line or after a semicolon? How much space should go between a comment and the semicolon? Should comments on successive lines be aligned? There are clearly tons of options here, and I think "use your judgment" will have to be a big part of it. However, we still need some ground rules. Look at [1] again. The comments are _all over the place_. Switching to spaces (see #2 above) will make this much more readable, but having some sort of concrete suggestion would be a good thing. As for how to accomplish these changes, my suggestion would be first, to decide on these, and possibly other, issues. Once the decisions have been made, people writing new code should adhere to the guidelines. At the same time, someone should go through and bring the old code into compliance (I might be up for this; we'll see). GNU indent ([2]) will probably be useful for this process. [2] http://indent.isidore-it.eu/beautify.html --xsdg ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Register Now for Creativity and Technology (CaT), June 3rd, NYC. CaT is a gathering of tech-side developers & brand creativity professionals. Meet the minds behind Google Creative Lab, Visual Complexity, Processing, & iPhoneDevCamp asthey present alongside digital heavyweights like Barbarian Group, R/GA, & Big Spaceship. http://www.creativitycat.com _______________________________________________ Geeqie-devel mailing list Geeqie-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/geeqie-devel
