Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language

[Oleh Krehel]

Andy Moreton <address@hidden> writes:

> On Tue 13 Oct 2015, Oleh Krehel wrote:
>
>> Paul Eggert <address@hidden> writes:
>>
>>> Oleh Krehel wrote:
>>>> I'd like to switch all const
>>>> pointers to a single "const char *" style.
>>>
>>> Let's not. It's more consistent to put 'const' after the type it
>>> modifies, and if we're going to have a "standard" style, that's the
>>> one we should have.
>>
>> "const char *" style is used in 85.9% of the cases. If you want to
>> revert those uses to "char const *" I'll support you, since I want the
>> consistency of a single style.
>
> Consistency is helpful, but pointless churn makes version history less
> useful, so please don't make this kind of change unless you are also
> making a semantic change to that area of the code.

One commit is pointless churn?

>>> But really, we have better things to do.
>>
>> I don't. I have no problem spending time to replace "char const *" into
>> "const char *". Browsing through a code base that I want to get familiar
>> with and fixing a small annoyance doesn't sound bad to me.
>
> Pointless churn. Find something that fixes an bug, or adds a useful new
> feature, and work on that. You will find it more rewarding, and other
> users and developers will find your contribution more helpful.

I don't care about pleasing the user or developer gods. I want to do
what's helpful for me, and I think that change would be. I'm offering to
do the work for free, and currently I'm not offering any other work as
an alternative. You either want the improvement or not. The concerns for
opportunity cost are irrelevant here.

Very often I see /harmless/ suggestions turned down as not worth it,
both on this list and on debbugs. This isn't a good way to move forward
if we want to expand the base of developers and bug-reporting users.