too many lines too long

[Edward Z. Yang]

For me, a huge reason why the line length errors are annoying
is because there will often be some existing line which is 80+,
and I just need to change one word in it.  Well, now that's
a line length error.

Now, I *could* refactor the line so that it's less than 80.
But this (1) fluffs up the diffs with non-semantic noise, and
(2) makes merge conflicts a lot more likely.

I think the counts thing could help for this case.  But now
suppose there's an existing line which is just barely under
80, and you need to do a mechanical substitution which pushes
it over. Yes, I /could/ reindent it, but it's a huge timesink
for no very good reason.  Usually the best way to eliminate
a long line is to refactor the entire region of code, e.g.
splitting out helper functions or whatnot.

Edward

Excerpts from Richard Eisenberg's message of 2015-11-09 13:02:48 -0800:
> Hi devs,
> 
> We seem to be uncommitted to the ideal of 80-character lines. Almost every patch on Phab I look through has a bunch of "line too long" lint errors. No one seems to do much about these. And Phab's very very loud indication of a lint error makes reviewing the code harder.
> 
> I like the ideal of 80-character lines. I aim for this ideal in my patches, falling short sometimes, of course. But I think the current setting of requiring everyone to "explain" away their overlong lines during `arc diff` and then trying hard to ignore the lint errors during code review is wrong. And it makes us all inured to more serious lint errors.
> 
> How about this: after `arc diff` is run, it will count the number of overlong lines before and after the patch. If there are more after, have the last thing `arc diff` outputs be a stern telling-off of the dev, along the lines of
> 
> > Before your patch, 15 of the edited lines were over 80 characters.
> > Now, a whopping 28 of them are. Can't you do better? Please?
> 
> Would this be ignored more or followed more? Who knows. But it would sure be less annoying. :)
> 
> What do others think?
> 
> Thanks,
> Richard