Re: Adapt fixcc.py to use Astyle instead of emacs (issue4662074)

[Trevor Daniels]

Jan Nieuwenhuizen wrote Monday, July 04, 2011 10:28 AM


> Trevor Daniels writes:
>
> > I agree.  This is a big improvement, and would
> > give us control over the layout style ourselves
> > (rather than "what emacs does").
>
> While the work being done here is possibly a good thing, let me 
> remind
> you once more that we are a GNU project and thus use the GNU 
> standards
> and thus we need no control over, we need not decide about, we 
> need not
> discuss layout style.  That's a feature.

I looked at the GNU coding standards for C:
http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#Formatting

They are defined very loosely, and are recommendations rather than
hard requiements.  To quote:

"We don’t think of these recommendations as requirements, because
it causes no problems for users if two different programs have 
different
formatting styles.

"But whatever style you use, please use it consistently, since a 
mixture
of styles within one program tends to look ugly. If you are 
contributing
changes to an existing program, please follow the style of that 
program."

So what we are doing seems to me to be quite compatible with GNU
standards.

> The GNU standards are implemented by Emacs, and if it makes an 
> error,
> then that's a serious bug that should be reported (to emacs).  It 
> seems
> to me that someone is spending a lot of effort `just' to 
> accomodate
> people who haven't found how awesome Emacs is to edit code and 
> thus
> introduce layout problems.  This makes it now easier to use 
> another
> editor than Emacs, which may or may not be an improvement.  While
> choice is good, in this case it decreases the need for non-Emacs
> users to try Emacs, and I'm not at all sure if that's a feature.

Surely you're not serious!  Are you??  Decreasing the need for Emacs
is the whole point of this discussion.

> Greetings,
> Jan.

Trevor