Re: Code formatter

[Chris Snyder]

Graham Percival wrote:
> I'm afraid that you won't get many positive responses until you
> look at the previous discussion about this issue.  Again, the main
> developers have been bitten by people in the past asking many
> questions, spending hours explaining things to them, but then
> ultimately giving up and disappearing.

Before I started looking at formatters, I did search lilypond-devel and 
the issues tracker, but didn't come up with them (other than an issue 
for automatically formatting .ly files). It looks like I didn't do an 
extensive enough search or use the correct terms. The issue that Neil 
linked to brought me up to speed (I wasn't even aware that the frogs had 
their own mailing list).

> I don't want to be discouraging, but most people won't take you
> seriously unless you prove that you've done your research.  I'm
> sorry, I know this *does* sound discouraging... but we have had
> *years* of experience with people not following through.  You know
> the expression "once bitten, twice shy?"  for us, it's "ten times
> bitten, twenty times shy".

Understood, and I realize that I haven't exactly proven myself in this 
community yet. I'm also comfortable enough here now that I'm not taking 
your response personally.

> I'm sorry to be discouraging -- again, I think this would be a
> *fantastic* project, especially if it handles scheme as well --
> but it will be a *lot* more work than you're envisioning at the
> moment.

There is one thing that bugs me about this discussion (and others) - it 
seems like sometimes improvements are rejected as being "not good 
enough," even if they're still an incremental improvement. Wouldn't 
running all of the C++ code through astyle still be an improvement over 
the current situation? It wouldn't prevent future formatting mistakes 
and it wouldn't help with the Scheme and ly code, but it would still be 
a step in the right direction.

Thanks,
-Chris