README (style wars meta discussion)

[alwinm]

Welcome to the Style Wars. Only by experiencing great division can we unify once again...

In this README I discuss our current plan which we can iterate.

In parallel:
1a) discuss default choice sets (e.g. Google vs Mozilla vs...) for clang-format in 1 Discussion
1b) discuss default choice sets (e.g. Google vs Mozilla vs...) for clang-tidy in 1 Discussion
1c) for each individual choice (e.g. case naming, spaces/tabs) you feel strongly about, start a new Discussion to discuss it
2) TODO: someone will have to learn how to use clang-tidy and clang-format
3a) Have a live group meeting where we finalize choices
3b) Push choices
4) Enforce/Iterate for eternity

Voting and discussing:
I currently imagine we will use 4 emotes when voting:
👎 to be used (scarcely) to show strong disapproval (please explain).
😕 to show disapproval.
👀 to show you have seen something, you're okay with it, and don't feel strongly one way or another.
👍 to show strong approval.

To keep voting organized, make each choice a Comment on the Discussion. The top level Comments should all be voting options or a neutral introduction to the topic. Debates should all happen in Replies: general replies under the neutral introduction, option-specific pros/cons under their vote Comment.

Thus the hierarchy is as follows: Discussions (for each issue), Comments (for each option), Replies (for each pro/con)

FAQ:
(I'll edit this as appropriate)

[alwinm]

Image credit for the Style Wars screen: @bcaddy

[bcaddy]

Here's some useful links we might need.

• clang-format configurator
• clang-tidy identifier naming (@helenarichie you might want to check this out)
• clang-rename refactoring tool. Likely to be very helpful with updating names and such to the new naming conventions. VSC has similar functionality

Other static analyzers we might want to consider:

• Cppcheck
• Include What You Use

[helenarichie]

[bcaddy]

I wasn't super clear on the Discussion/comment/thread layout either but I agree that naming convention should be it's own Discussion. I also don't want to have a million discussions. Maybe for now we have a Discussion for formatting and another for naming conventions and comments/threads within those can debate different points. That way all the discourse for a given topic is in one Discussion and not spread out across several.

Sorry if this contradicts our talk yesterday, Discussion, discussion, comment, and thread are hard to keep track of when they all mean similar but slightly different things.

[helenarichie]

Ah I see, I guess I didn't quite understand the format either. Alwin, if you make a separate Discussion thread for naming I will repost this comment in there and delete the one in here!

[bcaddy]

@helenarichie, you can make it. Like Issues and PRs it doesn't take admin privileges. (idk if that's new, I just checked to see if I could make one)

[alwinm]

Sorry that it was confusing. Thanks all. I agree we shouldn't have a million. I imagine each person will probably contribute between 1-3 things they really really care about, but I do think each topic worth voting on should be its own Discussion.

[bcaddy]

Link to discussion thread for the deleted comment: #206

[alwinm]

Hey y'all,

Wanted to see what ppl think about how we should use the 👎 emoji in voting: strong negative, negative-leaning but acceptable? Our voting system will take some time to develop :)

[bcaddy]

IMO

👍 = "I like this"
😕 = "I don't like this"
👀 = "I have seen this and don't care"
👎 = "I veto this"

[alwinm]

Writing a comment here that some additional long-term goal will be:

defining some good practices for doxygen
for our zoo of comments

[bcaddy]

Keyword vs. Symbol Logical Operators

Per @alwinm's suggest and the brief discussion in PR #327 I'm add a place here for discussion/citation of us using keyword (and, not, or, etc) logical operators instead of symbol operators (&&, !, ||, etc). The original discussion has been lost to the annals of Slack but I believe our decision was that keyword operators are more readable and so we should use them moving forward.

[helenarichie]

I agree that keyword operators are more readable, so I'd prefer to use those!

[alwinm]

Thanks for opening the discussion! My preference is not to enforce in either direction. There are still a lot of (!bool) throughout the Cholla code and the Google style guide prefers punctuation logical operators, even though I personally find keyword operators more readable.

[bcaddy]

Yeah, I don’t think it’s super critical. More the kind of thing that if someone notices it in a PR to comment on it

[alwinm]

I would consider that a form of enforcement and I also think that automatic enforcement is a better approach than PR comments pushing preferences.