Re: [phpGroupWare-developers] New developers (Was: Nested db-objects)

[Sigurd Nes]

Chris Weiss wrote:
> On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 3:26 PM, Sigurd Nes <address@hidden> wrote:
> > My problem is that my code base is huge - and I can't keep up with rapid
> > changes in what is considered proper coding at all time.
>
> the only change to the coding that standards that has even been
> proposed in the last 5 years or more was the line lengths.  We've had
> a coding standards doc since very early, and IMO the separation of
> logic and storage is clear, but it's been ignored and allowed to go
> unchallenged, much to my frustration every time i do try to work on
> some code.
>
> However, as an example of how "no tolerance" affects smaller teams,
> the eGW fork is directly related to putting a foot down on not
> following the design goals and standards.  Joomla being a CMS has a
> large enough demand that they can afford to do this.  We do it and
> loose half the team.
Some historical changes along the way:

Links
Initially http-links was created trough a call to a function that accepted both 
strings an arrays. This was changed to only accept arrays.

charset
The character set changed from ISO 8859-1 to UTF-8 without any option of choice, 
 which led to unexpected behaviour and a need for reworking the code.

notices
The E_NOTICE is useful for debugging while developing / coding the system,  but 
at some point this errors suddenly (and shockingly) got echoed to the screen 
with no option of turning it off.

get_var
Suddenly it was changed, and all calls to it had to be revised to the new one.

db-cloning
Well - you know the story...

Sniffer
Testing code for good looks. You ought to try it.

I'm fine with all this except the non-optional debug mode (notices), the (lack 
of) db-cloning and reworking consisting code based on the sniffer result.

Regards

Sigurd