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Re: mutt development and road map



On Thu, Jul 14, 2005 at 09:37:31PM +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> On 2005-07-14 12:17:27 -0400, Derek Martin wrote:
> >   - The UI should be completely divorced from the funcntionality.
> >     What I mean is, if someone wanted to, they should be able to
> >     delete the modules pertaining to the UI, and re-write them from
> >     scratch without touching any other code in mutt.  It should be
> >     possible to add on an alternative UI, without affecting the
> >     existing one (e.g. to make it easier for a braille user, or a
> >     screen reader, or to add a GUI, etc.), should someone want to do
> 
> and to write a new UI in another language...

Sure!

> >     that.  The only code which should be affected is the initial
> >     set-up code to decide which gui is used.
> 
> > I'd also really like to see someone fix the formatting of the
> > code... I personally hate the GNU coding standards -- I think
> > they're horrific -- but aside from that whenever I've looked at
> > mutt's code, it always seems the indentation is inconsistent,
> > sometimes using spaces, sometimes tabs, etc.
> 
> IMHO, tabs should never be used. In particular, they lead to problems
> with copy-paste from various places (e.g. copy-pasting a patch from a
> web page).

You can always just not use copy-paste...  You could download the file
instead (patches are usually, but not always, posted in plain ASCII
text), and just read it into your editor.  :)

One case for using tabs (there are others; see Linus T.'s explanation
of the Linux kernel coding style for more) is that it provides the
opportunity for everyone to be happy...  Most reasonable editors let
the user control how many spaces are indented when displaying tab
characters.  So, everyone gets to use whatever indent they prefer by
just changing the width of tab.  

I like tabs.  ;-)  But then, I also happen to agree with Linus on
coding style, in general.  It predates him though, it comes from
reading a lot of W.  Richard Stevens' books (he uses a coding style
which is very similar, though perhaps not exactly the same), and
certain other authors with similar styles.

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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