RE: Fwd: sed porting trouble

[Schmitz, Joachim]

Yes, I agree (now)

Bye, Jojo

-----Original Message-----
From: Bruno Haible [mailto:address@hidden 
Sent: Saturday, October 02, 2010 1:24 PM
To: Schmitz, Joachim
Cc: Paul Eggert; Paolo Bonzini; 'bug-gnulib'
Subject: Re: Fwd: sed porting trouble

Joachim Schmitz wrote:
> - your changes would affect 19 files, Pauls only 12

Your way of measuring complexity is misguided. The same change to 19 files
must count as one. 3 changes that affect 39 files in total is simpler than
24 changes that affect 12 files in total.

> - The ...in.h file are not the problem, but the resulting .h files.
> Their lines might be shorter or even longer

Good point. Yes, when stuff from build-aux/c++defs.h or build-aux/warn-on-use.h
gets inserted during the conversion .in.h -> .h, it can also contain lines
longer than 80 columns (and it does!).

> URLs ain't C code, so they may appear in comments. As long as the */ is on
> the next line, truncation is OK.

This would be another syntactic rule that the developer has to remember:
"you can use comment lines longer than 80 columns, but only if the comment
terminator is on the next line".

The fewer rules a maintainer has to remember, the better.
The fewer rules a new contributor has to learn, the better.

Bruno