[Asterisk-Dev] [Rant] [long] - code style and quality

[Steve Underwood]

Andrew Kohlsmith wrote:

>On May 7, 2005 06:01 am, Steve Underwood wrote:
>  
>
>>Do people actually look at the bugtracker any more? I think most of us
>>gave up long ago.
>>    
>>
>
>So... let me get this straight.
>
>You blast the guy for discussing it here, telling him to do something useful 
>like submit patches, and then admit that the place where you're supposed to 
>submit them is not all that useful since "most of use gave up" on it?
>
>I know you've done lots of great things for Asterisk and the community, but if 
>"whining" about it is useless and there's no place to put patches to get this 
>kind of thing corrected, what is your suggestion?
>  
>
Whine about a real problem - the bug tracker has become useless. I find 
the original post truly obnoxious. It is postings like that which often 
want to make me give up writing free software. I don't know the guy's 
background, be he writes like someone who is somewhere in the middle of 
the C 101 course, and wants to tell the world what he found. People who 
have actually produced something complex and useful seldom write that 
way. They know real code gets messy as time goes on. Cleaning it up is 
not only time consuming, it risks breaking proven code in subtle ways. I 
often go through major cleanups in my own code, and accept the suffering 
it causes re-debugging things that used to work. That is me causing me 
problems. That's my right. People have no right to even suggest others 
should tolerate similar suffering.

We don't need beginners lessons in coding. Some of us finished those 30 
odd years ago. We need good ideas, and good (that means definitely 
reliable, and hopfully pretty and easy to read) code from as many people 
as possible.

>Did someone shit in your cornflakes or are you out of booze too?  :-)
>  
>
Good people don't drink alcohol.

Regards,
Steve