Christian Couder <christian.couder@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > Sorry for the noise. When 6d0618a8 (Add Documentation/CodingGuidelines, 2007-11-08) started a written guideline, the project already had two-year's worth of accumulated code. It was more like "we have been operating without any written guideline, and so far it has been OK because most of our contributors and reviewers were competent and interaction among them amicable. But now we are having more new faces. It is a good time to codify the rules that we have been trying to adhere to. It is possible we may have missed some violations during our reviews and have already took bad apples in the code base, but they are tolerated-but-undesirable exceptions. These are the rules we have been trying to follow." It is expected that there are some corner cases that violate the writings without meaning to. Anybody reading the document should take it as an aspirational guide, where existing violations (1) are not excuses to introduce more deviations, (2) are "once written, it is often not worth the code churn to go and fix them only for the sake of fixing them", and (3) are very welcome to be rewritten if you are rewriting the code that covers (not merely overlaps) the area. And we writing or updating the document should try to make sure that the aspirational nature is clear to readers. So your intention to improve the wording of one single item was surely appreciated, but I think the effort is better spent to make sure that readers are aware that not just that single item, but everything in the guideline, may have existing violations in the code base, and they understand how they should treat these existing violations, perhaps by polishing the preamble to the whole guideline document somehow. Thanks.
