[pacman-dev] [PATCH 4/5] Versioned provisions

[Aaron Griffin]

On Nov 19, 2007 12:59 PM, Dan McGee <dpmcgee at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Nov 19, 2007 12:34 PM, Xavier <shiningxc at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Mon, Nov 19, 2007 at 12:13:14PM -0600, Aaron Griffin wrote:
> > > On Nov 18, 2007 8:06 PM, Dan McGee <dpmcgee at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > == 0 is much clearer, so I'm going to change this back if I pull the
> > > > patch. Let's not take shortcuts in C just because they work- lets make
> > > > the code readable for everyone. It will all get compiled the same way
> > > > anyway. As a general rule, I always want to see an == or != used with
> > > > strcmp- it is just easier to digest.
> > >
> > > This is also in the pacman coding guidelines somewhere, for the record.
> > >
> >
> > Thank you for bringing this up again, I already forgot.
> > That's exactly what I wanted to say : if patches are going to be rejected for
> > a code style reason, then all these reasons should be written somewhere.
> > I don't see what other places to look at, all other coding guidelines are in
> > HACKING, and I can't find any mention of strcmp.
> >
> > Also, this rule only applies to strcmp? Because it returns 0 in case of
> > success?
> > And I just grepped the source for strcmp, it seems like it isn't used with ==
> > or != in the majority of the cases. Even though there are also many cases
> > where it is.
> >
> > Note that I don't have any problem with coding guidelines, as long as they
> > are clear and written.
> > I'm all for a consistent style.
>
> OK, I will put this on my TODO list and get it into the GIT repo- I
> think it makes more sense and we can all refer to it there. I will
> also add some of these "unwritten rules". I'll even post it here first
> to see if their are any objections.
>
> http://www.archlinux.org/~aaron/pacman-coding.html

I thought there was a better version of this somewhere.

Either way, the pseudo-rule was something to the effect of:

   if(!strcmp(a,b)) { /* success case */ }

This is bad because it just doesn't read right. You're using a
negative to check for a success case. The compiler is going to do the
same thing regardless, so why not make this readable:

   if(strcmp(a,b) == 0) { /* success case */ }

Dan, feel free to disagree with me on this one