On Sun, Mar 11, 2012 at 3:00 PM, Stefan Tauner
<stefan.tauner@student.tuwien.ac.at> wrote:
all of that could be replaced with a simple "we want to limit lines to
ca. y chars, please think a bit and use common sense when breaking
lines" rule imho. hard limits can never have enough rules/exceptions to
match "common sense". of course i am ignoring personal preferences
here, but i think i can cope better with "annoying" preferences of
others when reviewing patches or getting feedback than with hard limits
that make me write lines like "\tab\tab\tab i) {". :)
+1. Hard limits will never quite capture every rule and exception to match common sense. I dislike militant enforcement of code style, but I think 80 columns (with 8-char indentation) is a useful soft limit to aspire to for encouraging concise code. I think I'd rather see the 80 column soft-limit broken only when it makes sense to do so (arbitrary, I know), preferably only in affected areas (e.g. tables).
Breaking the soft limit, whether it's to nest deeper or add a huge print statement to Flashrom's already verbose output, should take some careful consideration but should not distract from the ultimate goal of readability and maintainability.