launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Julian Edwards <julian.edwards@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tuesday 14 June 2011 10:13:06 Robert Collins wrote:
> Can you expand on the value you get? What does it do for you / us to
> be told about whitespace and indentation variation?

Well like I said, pyflakes catches most of them for me.  If someone else 
doesn't fix their lint then it shows up in my editor.

I appreciate the aesthtics of neat and tidy code, formatted as the coder 
intended.

> I've had very good experience with them on every project that got them
> up and running (and smashed on a few times to sort teething-issues
> out) in the past.

Maybe my experience is more tainted than yours :)

> So, to me, just about all of the format-and-layout warnings are
> useless: they don't make our code less buggy; my argument here is to
> free our brains to focus on the stuff that matters; lower the bar for
> casual contributors [by lowering the workload for all developers].
> Many folk have internalised the rules, but many more haven't.

Good formatting is part of good coding practice IMO, and helps prevent the 
bugs appearing in the first place in my experience.  But I agree that this 
should not be a barrier to entry for casual contributors.

I'm still -1 but I'll wait for other opinions and go with the flow.