Re: [PATCH] SubmittingPatches: Increase the line length limit from80 to 100 colums

[Ingo Molnar]

* Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Fri, 3 Feb 2012 11:07:43 +0100
> Ingo Molnar <mingo@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> > [PATCH] SubmittingPatches: Increase the line length limit from 80 to 100 colums
> > 
> > The overwhelming majority of kernel developers have stopped 
> > using 80 col terminals years ago.
> > 
> > As far as I'm aware I was the last regular kernel 
> > contributor who still used a standard VGA text console, but 
> > both text consoles and using them to read the kernel source 
> > code has become increasingly gruesome years ago so I 
> > switched to a wider terminal two years ago.
> 
> I always use 80-cols, everywhere.  Not because I particularly 
> like it - I find it a bit too small.  I use it because it is 
> the standard, and using it helps me see where and how badly we 
> violate the standard.
> 
> We've actually done pretty well - linewrap in 80 cols rarely 
> causes me problems.  It's sufficiently rare that when it 
> *does* happen, it really stands out.

Maybe it got better after the introduction of checkpatch - I 
stopped using 80col terminals because the situation *was* 
getting so bad and because i did not feel like fighting a 
thousand other kernel developers who had different preferences 
;-)

> IOW, the changelog is quite the exaggeration.

You are right about that.

> > So lets increase the limit to 100 cols
> 
> I think that's going too far - 96 will be enough and it's a 
> multiple of 8.
> 
> The multiple-of-8 thing seems pleasing but probably doesn't 
> matter much.  It means that things like
> 
> 
> if (foo) {
> 	if (foo) {
> 		if (foo) {
> 			if (foo) {
> 				if (foo) {
> 					if (foo) {
> 						if (foo) {
> 							if (foo) {
> 								if (foo) {
> 									if (foo) {
> 										if (foo) {
> 											if (foo) {
> 												if (foo) {
> 													if (foo) {
> 														if (foo) {
> 												
> 
> will line up properly.
> 
> If we really want to improve the world we should jump into a 
> time machine and set tabstops to 4.  Sigh.

I think that would be a distinctly bad decision - people could 
have crazy, 10 levels nesting in a function and be technically 
'compliant'.

8 col tabs _forces clean code_ more often than not. I know about 
very few functions in the kernel that legitimately need more 
than 3 or 4 levels of nesting.

And that is why I agree with the 6-tab based warning approach - 
then we can remove the 80col warning which is really making 
things actively worse.

Thanks,

	Ingo
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