Re: An abridged "Writing C" for the gcc web pages

[Jason Merrill <jason at redhat dot com>]

On 04/22/2016 12:42 PM, Paul_Koning@Dell.com wrote:
> > On Apr 22, 2016, at 12:21 PM, Bernd Schmidt <bernds_cb1@t-online.de> wrote:
> >
> > (Apologies if you get this twice, the mailing list didn't like the html attachment in the first attempt).
> >
> > We frequently get malformatted patches, and it's been brought to my attention that some people don't even make the effort to read the GNU coding standards before trying to contribute code. TL;DR seems to be the excuse, and while I find that attitude inappropriate, we could probably improve the situation by spelling out the most basic rules in an abridged document on our webpages. Below is a draft I came up with. Thoughts?
>
> Would you expect people to conform to the abridged version or the full standard?  If the full standard, then publishing an abridged version is not a good idea, it will just cause confusion.  Let the full standard be the rule, make people read it, and if they didn't bother that's their problem.

And this isn't strictly an abridged version, as it contains information 
that is not part of the GNU standard.

> +The format should be text/plain so that mail clients such as
> +thunderbird can display and quote it, without forcing potential
> +reviewers to take extra steps to save it and open it elsewhere before
> +being able to look at it.</p>

I note that this patch itself is sent as text/x-patch, which thunderbird 
handles fine.  And apparently so does gmail, if you use the .diff 
extension; the .patch extension that I have tended to use doesn't work 
properly, so I guess I'll switch.

> +<p>All leading whitespace should be replaced with tab characters as
> +much as possible, but tab characters should not be used in any other
> +circumstances.

Some headers also use tabs to separate the parameter-list from the 
function name.

Jason