too many lines too long

[Austin Seipp]

Something like this might be possible. It'd just require implementing
a new arcanist linter, I think, and enabling it in .arclint

In general I really sympathize with this. The problem 90% of people
hit is that they touch a line that was *already* over 80 columns, so
'arc lint' warns them and gets annoyed, but they don't want to fix or
split up a bunch of stuff to avoid it. It's an issue of having to do
'boring work' which nobody likes, and seems very tedious, regardless
of the mechanism of how they do the change.

Really, I'm more inclined to begin a policy of rejecting reviews that
do not pass the linter. Exceptions can be made, but in general we need
to start *enforcing it* with the red button I think. And it would
require us to be more diligent about merging patches quickly to reduce
the scope of merge conflicts (because fixing an 80col violation
normally, almost always, adds more LOC).

However, there are people who in general think the contribution
barrier is already too high, and I fear that enforcing this with a
hard rule may make people 'give up' because it seems like a pointless
thing to mandate to block their changes. I'm not sure how people feel
about that, but it is worth keeping in mind the developer economics.

I hope suggesting the possibility of being more forceful against 80col
violations doesn't derail this too much. :)

On Mon, Nov 9, 2015 at 3:02 PM, Richard Eisenberg <eir at cis.upenn.edu> wrote:
> 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
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-- 
Regards,

Austin Seipp, Haskell Consultant
Well-Typed LLP, http://www.well-typed.com/