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Rather than bitch about the work that someone generously donated for your benefit, why not roll up your sleeves and contribute a patch that makes things "better
by mikerg87 15y ago
Rather than bitch about the work that someone generously donated for your benefit, why not roll up your sleeves and contribute a patch that makes things "better". With FOSS you get what you pay for.
- overgard 15y agoCode generally is bad either because the writer doesn't care or was in a hurry, or because they don't know better and they think they /are/ writing good code. If it's the former they might accept a patch to clean things up, but if it's the latter I doubt they would.
- raganwald 15y agoInteresting comment, thanks! Think about submitting a pull request to a major project reformatting the code and renaming a lot of variables. This will touch so much code that reviewers will consider it high risk. But it doesn't fix any bugs, add new functionality, or refactor the code to make something else easy. It's risky now with a hard-to-quantify payoff later. On top of that, our current tools make this painful, a pervasive patch like this will produce a lot of merge conflicts unless handled carefully. I see a lot of forces acting against rolling up our sleeves and fixing code beauty on a non-trivial project with a lot of users and committers.
- astrodust 15y agoYou may as well repeatedly shoot yourself in the face for all the good cleaning up code will do. It's indented like a train-wreck because someone wanted it that way and they will likely fight you tooth and nail to keep it as it is.