Re: style(9) patches to mrouted(8), edquota(8)

[Chris Pressey <cpressey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 15 Mar 2004 09:39:04 -0800 (PST)
Matthew Dillon <dillon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>     'eek'.  All right.  This will take about half an hour for me to
>     go through :-).

I think I misunderstood your advice regarding rollup patches; I could've
(should've) split this into two stages...

>     One note:  A lot of people, including me, prefer char **argv
>     instead of char *argv[].  Don't worry about it, I'll fix it up.
[... 09:45:58 -0800 (PST) ...]
>     Also another general note (to everyone):  do not put blank lines
>     in procedures with no declarations.  e.g.:

Urk.  I was just going "by the book."  These should be in style(9), yes?

Which brings me to another slightly weird issue.  Have a look at the
disclaimer in the copyright message on style(9):

"IN NO EVENT SHALL [your name] OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE"...

:)

There's probably no *real* legal issue caused by this, but... I'd
definately feel better if it were correctly attributed.  Since DragonFly
did not put the copyright on that file, we can't change the disclaimer. 
We could ask the FreeBSD project to fix it, then backport that, but they
aren't exactly speedy with changes to style(9) it seems, judging by the
outstanding PR's on it.

This, plus the fact the page has a choppy, patchwork feel that is a bit
hard to read, makes me just want to rewrite it as a "real" document with
better structure.  I know that's a lot of work, though.

I also know some people don't want a bloated, overly picky set of style
rules, but I've seen so much downright bizarre code in my lifetime
that I've come to the conclusion that explicit, comprehensive and
precise coding guidelines are definately worth the effort.  One example
of fairly well-written guidelines is

  http://www.erlang.se/doc/programming_rules.shtml

(although a lot a Erlang programmers don't follow it either,
unfortunately :)

-Chris