[pacman-dev] Useless comments...

[Xavier]

On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 7:06 AM, Allan McRae <allan at 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 :)