too many lines too long

[Richard Eisenberg]

I agree that being forceful about the 80-col limit would solve my problem.

But I really dislike the idea. There will always be long-running patches. Volunteers can't be relied on to have time available to continue their work right away. And so I think this decision would increase barriers to contributing and increase merge conflicts for a cause that, frankly, isn't terribly important. (To repeat: I *do* want 80-col lines. I just want an amazing compiler more.)

Richard

On Nov 9, 2015, at 4:15 PM, Austin Seipp <austin at well-typed.com> wrote:

> 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/
>