[jira] [Resolved] (GIRAPH-231) Overly prescriptive check-style requirements considered harmful

["Dionysios Logothetis (Jira)" <ji...@apache.org>]

     [ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/GIRAPH-231?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:all-tabpanel ]

Dionysios Logothetis resolved GIRAPH-231.
-----------------------------------------
    Resolution: Abandoned

> Overly prescriptive check-style requirements considered harmful
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: GIRAPH-231
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/GIRAPH-231
>             Project: Giraph
>          Issue Type: Bug
>            Reporter: Jakob Homan
>            Priority: Major
>
> The current checkstyle settings are extremely precise and an excellent codification of particular coding style preference.  However, like in religion and politics, reasonable and thoughtful people can have disagreements and should be accommodating to each other.  The current checkstyle requirements venture into a lot of territory where disagreements and common and often conflict with other styles that are perfectly reasonable.  Right now one can generate a perfectly reasonable looking patch that then takes longer to make checkstyle than it did to create it.
> A few examples:
> * Whether or not a for or if statement has a space before its opening paren does not in any way make the code less or more readable or bug free.  Either preference is valid.  
> * Not every method or field requires javadoc.  I trust every contributor (or, barring that, reviewer) to use their experience and judgment to determine if one is needed
> * 80 characters per line is a reasonable arbitrary limit.  But so is 85 or 90.  And 80 seems to cause a lot of lines to be cut off at very odd places from a readability standpoint.  I trust every contributor (or, barring that, reviewer) to determine if the line will cause some huge system failure by going to 83 characters.  For instance which is worse:
> {noformat}
> String timeUnitString = conf.get(GIRAPH_METRICS_DEFAULT_TIME_PERIOD,
>     "SECONDS");
> {noformat}
> or
> {noformat}
> String timeUnitString = conf.get(GIRAPH_METRICS_DEFAULT_TIME_PERIOD, "SECONDS");
> {noformat}
> Everybody has a preference on each of the items above, but I don't think anyone can reasonably make an argument that another's preference leads to more bugs or is objectively bad.
> Overly strict checkstyle settings, which is what I think we've ended up with, don't actually end up improving the readability of the code.  Instead, they add a large amount of friction between contributors.  If I spend most of my time in using another style that doesn't allow spaces between if and (, I find it painful and frustrating to try to contribute to this project.  Readability is not something that can be guaranteed by any checkstyle configuration and instead, we should loosen the requirements and trust our contributors and reviewers to keep a good eye out for subtle errors and leave checkstyle to police the egregious ones.



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