On 21/06/2008, at 5:30 AM, chi@chimeric.de wrote:
Even though the changes I've sent until now where small, I also agree with Loui, when he says the AUR is more in maintenance mode (IIRC there where already two attempts for AUR2, though I don't know much about their current state).
Being the main dev of the second attempt at AUR2, I'd like to know as well :P. I think sticking to coding conventions is a good idea. Developers should be disciplined and strictly adhere to them, it really does make maintenance easier. I'd be great if people also wrote doxygen/phpdoc documentation to make maintenance and later development much, much easier. It doesn't matter if the code won't be used by anyone else, internal documentation is also very useful. Having said that, I don't know if a lot of effort should be put into fixing up the current code base (especially technical writing). I think everyone agrees that the AUR needs a rewrite.
The problem, as I see it for someone who likes to send a patch, is, that you usually address a specific "problem" with a patch. Although cleaning the code makes always sense, it should IMHO be separated into separate patch sets and not mixed with other patches in order to not blur the "real" purpose of a patch.
I don't really see a problem with fixing up the code in terms of conventions along with other changes, as long as only the lines of code that would be changed either way are fixed up. If you go and change a bunch of other code, then that really should be in a separate patch. Of course when cherry-picking patches or something, it sometimes is nicer to have very specific patches, so that it would be possible to apply the "code standard adhering" patch to some other branch.