[U-Boot-Users] [PATCH] 2/9: bootp

[Robert Schwebel]

On Thu, Mar 06, 2003 at 04:31:10PM +0100, Wolfgang Denk wrote:
> Robert, what do you want to demonstrate?
> 
> That U-Boot was not written by one single person, stickng to  exactly
> one  coding  style?  That  there  are  deficiencies,  both formal and
> functional?
> 
> What you do right now is not helpful. You have enough  experience  to
> provide  really  valuable  input - see some of your previous patches.
> Please try to focus on substantial things, and concentrate  on  fixes
> and extensions.

You want open words, ok, here we go. 

Don't get me wrong, I generally have no problem with maintainers
rejecting my patches.  It's quite normal that maintainers know their
projects much better than I do, so I'm used to going back to the lab and
reworking stuff when it's necessary. 

My problem is that your argumentation regarding the "little things" is
not easily understandable. You have a document in your code which says
that Linux coding style should be used. If I send patches which fix
coding style (and yes, it's only in source files I have worked on,
otherwhise I wouldn't have found it) they are rejected. You say: improve
documentation; if I find something and do it you reject it because it is
not _exactly_ how you would have done it or how you did it. I try to
improve usability by making help messages more understandable, because
I, when I first tried to _use_ them didn't understand them and had to
look at the source first (every good engineer should know how important
the grandma test is ;). You reject them because I add 10 bytes to a 100
KiB bootloader. I try to improve #ifdef mess (and there's a lot of it
left, I can tell you!) by using all the well known techniques like debug
macros etc. You reject them because it doesn't change functionality. I
try to make code better readable by unsing correct indentation - you
reject it. Then, after all that 'it-doesn't-matter-how-the-code-looks-
like-if-it-works' I add two lines with

//#define foo
#undef foo
 
and you tell me that it's against the coding style. My impression is
that you didn't care a single bit about coding style with the other 
3.2 MiB of the code, so why do you care about my little improvements?
It's not that easy to understand.  

Wolfgang, all these puzzle pieces are not worth to be mentioned when you
see them separately, and I definitely have better things to do than
starting flame wars. But all that stuff together - including your
sometimes a little bit rude RTFM postings addressed to people who are
_not_ as deep into the project as you are - definitely don't improve the
mood of the developers here. 

Enough said - I would love to see an open discussion about how to
improve the coding style / #ifdef problems. 

Robert 
-- 
 Dipl.-Ing. Robert Schwebel | http://www.pengutronix.de
 Pengutronix - Linux Solutions for Science and Industry
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