Re: [Patch] Indentation in parser.yy

[Valentin Villenave]

On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 6:11 PM, Graham Percival
<address@hidden> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 4:27 PM, Trevor Daniels <address@hidden> wrote:
>> You know, after rebuffs like this it's hardly
>> surprising you don't get many people offering to
>> help you.  Seeing this, anyone thinking of offering
>> will likely think again.
>
> Valentin is a personal friend, and the grumpy/fluffy interplay
> has been a constant between us.  I take much more liberties with
> him than I would anybody else.  If I've taken too much liberty here, I
> apologize.  (I'll follow up with him off-list)

Wow, I'm not sure what's the most touching here: Trevor stepping up
very kindly (as always) or Graham referring to me as a "friend"...
Either way, I feel compelled to say something now :)

Whilst I do understand that such tactless rebuttals might look
impressive and unappealing to newcomers, I hope everyone who
subscribes to lily-devel understands that most people here actually
have known each other for years, and that there may be a subtext
implied in every such conversation.

Having been involved (and in charge of) several communities, I must
say that the quality of the LilyPond community is well above average,
as has been reported by quite a lot of contributors or visitors over
the years. Generally speaking, people here are friendly, intelligent,
helpful and inconceivably respectful towards each other. This specific
discussion makes my point: every time there might be some words
considered to harsh, someone steps up to try and defuse any possible
conflict (even in otherwise lost causes, as we've seen).

Graham has been my mentor for nearly five years now, and he somehow
still is, although I have consistently provided him with every reason
to give up on me: even though I disagree with him on this one, I
appreciate the fact that it took him less than 15 minutes to
acknowledge my patch -- albeit in his own way :)

> Look, we've had a few rounds of fruitless discussion about
> indentation, pretty much on a yearly basis.  Each time, after 20
> or 30 emails and goodness knows how many hours spent
> reading+writing (summed over all developers), nothing has changed.
> I'm trying to head off such a discussion so that people won't be
> (more) sick of the topic later on.

Well, maybe for once my approach is less ambitious than yours: from
what I gathered of said discussions, our policy was "do not push huge
commits affecting lots of files, but feel free to correct indentation
if you stumble upon inconsistencies in a source file you happen to be
working on". Which is what I did in this specific case.

Anyway, I certainly won't fight over this patch. Not being familiar
with C++/yacc development, I can't tell exactly how obtrusive it is
(and I suspect neither can you). All I know is that it feels good to
do something you don't think you totally suck at[1], and correcting
indentation did nicely fit in this category for me, at least compared
to coding, bug-handling, writing documentation or newsletters :)

Cheers,
Valentin

PS. BTW: many thanks to John for having taught me how to use emacs,
which now makes me able to indent files The Only Right Way® :-)