Open Stack

On 10/25/2013 03:43 PM, Robert Collins wrote:
> On 26 October 2013 08:40, Dolph Mathews <dolph.mathews at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 1:48 PM, Robert Collins <robertc at robertcollins.net>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> *) They help casual contributors *more* than long time core
>>> contributors : and those are the folk that are most likely to give up
>>> and walk away. Keeping barriers to entry low is an important part of
>>> making OpenStack development accessible to new participants.
>>
>>
>> This is an interesting point. My reasoning for removing them was that I've
>> never seen *anyone* working to maintain them, or to add them to files where
>> they're missing. However, I suspect that the users benefiting from them
>> simply aren't deeply enough involved with the project to notice or care
>> about the inconsistency?
> 
> Thats my hypothesis too.
> 
>> I'm all for low barriers of entry, so if there's
>> any evidence that this is true, I'd want to make them more prolific.
> 
> I'm not sure how to gather evidence for this, either for or against ;(.

vim and it's cousins constitutes only a subset of popular editors. Emacs
is quite popular and it requires different syntax and requires the per
file variables to be the 1st line (or the 2nd line if there is a shell
interpreter line on the 1st line). In Emacs you can also use "Local
Variables" comments at the end of the file (a location many will not see
or cause to move during editing). So don't see how vim and emacs
specifications will coexist nicely and stay that way consistently.

And what about other editors? Where do you stop?

My personal feeling is you need to have enough awareness to configure
your editor correctly to contribute to a project. It's your
responsibility and our gate tools will hold you to that promise.

Let's just remove the mode lines, they really don't belong in every file.


-- 
John