[MPlayer-dev-eng] [bikeshed] Coding style

[Uoti Urpala]

On Tue, 2008-06-17 at 19:57 +0200, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 10:57:13AM +0200, Diego Biurrun wrote:
> > Anyway, this thread is marked [bikeshed] for a good reason.  Voting on
> > each issue individually is a recipe for endless bikeshedding.  
> 
> > This is
> > not a good idea. 
> 
> It is a good idea to vote on the exact details of the style that we will have
> to live with in the foreseeable future.

You can't create a coding style that would be objectively better than
the existing ones to a nontrivial degree. The differences are mostly a
matter of what people are used to. The foreseeable future involves
developers leaving and new ones joining. Any personal quirks that
current developers would happen to agree to are less likely to be
favored by new developers than a standard style, and wasting time
arguing about the exact details is unlikely to create a significantly
more acceptable compromise style than a standard one for the current
developers either.

> > This is necessarily about tradeoffs and compromises.
> 
> Yes, compromisses and tradeoffs between the developers, not the compromise
> of everyone accepting whatever style uoti picked.

That would be a valid objection if I had given an arbitrary list of
rules defining a style I personally favor. It is not a valid objection
against using as standard a style as possible. I think you just want
anything I bring up to be rejected.