Upcoming 0.24

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2010-05-10 06:01-0700 Dan Nicholson wrote:

> On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 3:01 PM, Tollef Fog Heen <tfheen at err.no> wrote:
>> ]] Dan Nicholson
>>
>> | Not your fault, but could you fix the indentation for this patch? There
>> | should be two spaces for the first indent to match the rest of the file.
>> | Also, could you squash the second patch in?
>>
>> Speaking of which, I absolutely loathe the current coding style.  Would
>> anybody be terribly sorry if we switched to something else?  Either
>> BSDish or Linux kernel coding style comes to mind.
>
> No problem here. That crap with the braces makes me angry every time I see it.

Note that normally styling is an on-going problem because it is too much to
hope that every contributor (core developer or patch-sender) has the same
editor with the same style conventions configured.  And for small projects
like this one with relatively few contributors you don't want to turn off
potential contributors by saying patches in an incorrect style are not
acceptable.

Given this situation for PLplot we use a script that we run every so often
to clean up our style with no muss and no fuss (see
http://plplot.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/plplot/trunk/scripts/style_source.sh?view=log).
The default run of the script shows which of our source files (if any) are
not in the desired style. There is also a --diff option to show what changes
our styler (uncrustify) would make.  Finally, there is an --apply option
which forces all our source files to have the proper style.

We are extremely happy with using uncrustify for the heart of this
script since its configuration file allows you to really fine-tune the style
of your source code to virtually anything you like.  Also, there are some
useful template configuration files that come with uncrustify if you want to
adopt a well-known style (such as that of the Linux kernel).

Alan
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Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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