On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 7:06 AM, Allan McRae <allan@archlinux.org> wrote:
Hi,
if (you don't want to read a semi rant) exit 0;
I have noticed a number of useless comments in makepkg and have decided that they are worse than no comments. Examples:
1) This inspired the rant!
download_sources # we can only check checksums if we have all files check_checksums
Huh, why are we not checking for all files then? Because download_sources exits when it fails...
The problem with this comment is maybe more that it could be misleading. It could let us think that check_checksums assumes that all the files are here. But that is not the case. But there is still one interesting information here, it's what you said in your comment : "if download_sources return, it means all files are here" So the comment could be : download_sources # we have all files now, so check their integrity check_checksums
2) and there are a lot of these:
# fix flyspray feature request #2978 # fix flyspray bug #5923 # Fixes FS#10039 # fix flyspray #6246 #fix flyspray feature request #5223 # fix flyspray bug #5973
and I am guilty here... but I was at the airport with no internet access so I had no idea if these are important. And most of these appeared to be non-obscure features/fixes so did not need a comment justifying their inclusion.
If one of these fixes is not totally obvious, I would say it would be better having some comments explaining quickly what is done and why rather than having a link to flyspray. If it is obvious, I agree that no comment and no fs link is needed.
3) overly obvious comments
# do we have a changelog? if [ -f "$startdir/ChangeLog" ]; then
If you do not understand that test, then leave the code alone...
Now that's a typical example of useless comment, much more than the above :)