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

[Sandra Loosemore <sandra at codesourcery dot com>]

On 04/22/2016 10:42 AM, 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.

I agree; let's not have two documents that can conflict or get out of 
sync with each other, unless you can figure out how to extract the 
abridged document automatically from the full version.

I think it's fine to have something on the web pages explaining that all 
contributions must follow the GNU coding standards (with a link) since 
code that follows the same formatting conventions throughout is easier 
to read, and that (in particular) patches must match the style of the 
surrounding code.

-Sandra