[TYPO3-dev] [TYPO3-core] New TYPO3 Coding Guidelines

[Francois Suter]

Hi Peter,

> As far as I can see from earlier discussions: it's waste of time and 
> energy as core developers are already following this guide for month and 
> will not change.

I would to stress that writing CGLs is not an easy thing *at all*. In 
some cases it is possible rely on benchmarks because some syntax are 
more efficient than others, and even then we have to be sure that such 
benchmarks are reliable and reproducible.

Besides those (rather rare) situations, CGLs are mostly a matter of 
taste. The way you decide to use and write curly braces for code blocks 
(for example) is entirely subjective.

Maybe your bitter (at least that's how I feel them) remarks are due to 
the fact that you were present at the CGL session at T3DD08 and are 
wondering why some decisions (taken by public vote) were overruled. The 
main problem with that session was that there only rather few core team 
members. And we are the ones who need to live with CGLs on a daily basis 
(more or less ;-) ). So there was quite some dissent over some points 
and they were changed so that all core team members could feel at lease 
at ease, if not happy, with this new version of the CGLs.

In retrospect doing a public session about CGLs seems like a very bad 
idea. Yes, TYPO3 is an Open Source project and the broader community is 
a vital part of it, but trying to discuss subjective matters with 100 
people is definitely not a good idea. It's hard enough trying to find a 
consensus among a smaller group, like the core team (and please note 
that this is not a criticism of my fellow team members, it's just a fact 
and probably an unavoidable situation among any group of programmers).

Changing CGLs is not an exercise that should be undertaken lightly not 
too frequently. As Dmitry already pointed out, there's lot of legacy 
code in TYPO3 which doesn't match even the previous version of the CGLs. 
Changing too often will cause code chaos and a terrible overhead.

This doesn't mean that things can't be improved and you are always 
welcome to make suggestions. Just don't expect major changes unless 
there's a very good reason.

Last but not least, these CGLs are binding only for core patches. For 
extension developers they are just recommendations. So you are free to 
do what you prefer inside your own extensions if you can't bear our CGLs.

I hope this will clarify the situation and prevent too easy criticisms, 
although I'm no fool and have no hope of making everybody happy ;-)

Cheers

-- 

Francois Suter
Cobweb Development Sarl - http://www.cobweb.ch