[Gnu-arch-users] Re: give us a hand with arch

[Miles Bader]

"Mark A. Flacy" <address@hidden> writes:
> Andrea> Furthmore this user will read
> Andrea> the code will see this pollution and he will delete it because it's
> Andrea> not data and in turn it's useless to him, and it's only useful to
> Andrea> people who cares about tracking the kernel with a revision control
> Andrea> system, not him. You certainly don't want to lose the tracking code
> Andrea> because of that.

> Oh hogwash!  Are you REALLY stating that people randomly remove comments
> from the kernel source? 

Yeah, that seems silly.  As far as I can see, people never remove
_anything_ from the kernel source, even when it really should be ...
Um, :-)

Anyway, from personal experience with taglines, and with the kernel
source, I feel pretty confident in saying that:

  (1) Most people won't even notice the taglines [remember, they're
      usually at the _end_ of the source file, and are _small_],

  (2) Those that see them won't care [it's not like they're particularly
      ugly or intrusive],

  (3) Those that are making big smash-everything patches are probably
      clueful enough to be careful because these comments appear
      `special' [meaningful comments are not at all an alien concept in
      general], and people doing those sorts of patches usually seem to
      be very careful about not fucking stuff up.

      The one exception to this case is when someone entirely rewrites a
      file, and that's really the same as any new file -- you can either
      add a new tagline, or use the old one, it doesn't really matter so
      much.

  (4) Larry Mcvoy will bitch and moan and accuse everyone of not
      appreciating his selfless sacrifices, and threaten to withdraw
      bitkeeper support for 48 hours until the taglines are removed.

Ok, I'm not entirely confident about (4). :-)

Personally what _I'd_ like to see is a universal standard for taglines,
and bitkeeper use them too.  I can't be the one to suggest it though,
because I'm in Larry's kill-file...

-Miles
-- 
"Though they may have different meanings, the cries of 'Yeeeee-haw!' and
 'Allahu akbar!' are, in spirit, not actually all that different."