How to use this forum

[naderman]

The purpose of this forum is to discuss RFCs and patches.

A list of RFCs that are currently being worked on or have been completed can be found at http://wiki.phpbb.com/PhpBB4/RFC. If you want to create a new RFC please create a page with the name phpBB4/RFC/<name of RFC> on the wiki. Then enter it into the list and create a topic in this forum for its discussion.

An RFC can first be listed as a draft. Once the authors are satisfied with their work they can post a topic in this forum and move their RFC to the discussion section on the wiki. After a while the RFC will either be accepted, rejected or go back into draft mode when significant changes are required. When the RFC is updated a post should be placed in this forum to notify all participants of the discussion. Once an RFC has been accepted it should be implemented. You can either post a patch in the relevant topic (using git format-patch) or simply post the location of a public repository where you have worked on the implementation. Once consensus is reached that the implementation is satisfactory it will be merged into the phpBB repository.

Alternatively you can post a patch right away but this is only recommended for smaller changes. The patch will then have to be discussed and accepted as well. Patches should follow the coding guidelines: http://wiki.phpbb.com/PhpBB4/RFC/Coding_Guidelines

The official phpBB repository is located on github. The web interface is at http://github.com/phpbb/phpbb and the git repository itself can be found at git://github.com/phpbb/phpbb.git. Alternatively there is also an identical copy at git://code.phpbb.com/phpbb.git

We will post a document here in the future that you can use to assign copyright to phpBB Ltd. which is a non-profit company that should protect individual developers from legal problems. I will post more information on this once the document has been finalised. It will be based on the FLA by the FSFE and the FLA with modifications by KDE. If you are ok with signing your copyright over to phpBB Ltd. under conditions, such as it has to stay free software, more on those later, just use the default copyright notice. Otherwise you should add your name to the file header. This is however only acceptable if it is a very small number of files. If you want to contribute more we will ask you to sign the FLA.

The following is no longer the case but I left it here so the following posts make sense:
All files and class should have @author tags in their docblock. Whenever you make a change to a class or file you should add an @author tag for yourself so it is apparent who owns copyright of which part of the software. You should also add yourself to the @copyright notice.

[code reader]

All files and class should have @author tags in their docblock. Whenever you make a change to a class or file you should add an @author tag for yourself so it is apparent who owns copyright of which part of the software. You should also add yourself to the @copyright notice. We will post a document here in the future that you can use to assign copyright to phpBB Ltd. which is a non-profit company that should protect individual developers from legal problems. I will post more information on this once the document has been finalised. It will be based on the FLA by the FSFE and the FLA with modifications by KDE.

maybe a whole "phpbb4 coding guidelines" is in place.
i want to make a plea. this is not meant as a beginning of new argument, so feel free to reject it without providing justifications:

the 2 things that irritate me about the phpbb coding style are:
-- the insistence of having a { and } even for a single statements, e.g. after "if", "while" etc.
-- giving the opening "{" its own line.

these two decisions were made originally "to improve readability", but it is a well established fact that in reality they reduce readability.
maybe the best evidence is python, which very few will deny is *more* readable than either C or perl, while doing away with "{" and "}" altogether.
"{" and "}" are "syntactical sugar" that meant to make the compiler's life easier, but help humans very little.
indentation is sacred and should be observed at all costs, but "{" and "}" are pure noise, as far as readability is concerned, and only serve to distract the reader (at least *this* code reader) from what's important: the content of the statements rather than their bracketing.


this whole plea is somewhat off-topic, so let me repeat the "on-topic" part:
please publish a full "coding guidelines" for phpbb4, that will contain a full description or the author/copyright/license part.
(and please do away with the atrocious "$Id" and other cvs macros while you are at it).


thanks,
apologies for the rant(s).


peace.

[ToonArmy]

While I agree we need to set the standards for coding soon, I don't agree on the curly braces. I actually find them helpful and find Python more annoying to read than C/C++.

[Highway of Life]

but it is a well established fact that in reality they reduce readability.

How is it a "well established fact"? Who established this "fact"?

If you want to carry on the debate regarding the usage of curly braces (or lack thereof), you might want to start a new topic on the subject, I know there are a lot of people who would strongly disagree with you on that issue.

[Handyman]

the 2 things that irritate me about the phpbb coding style are:
-- the insistence of having a { and } even for a single statements, e.g. after "if", "while" etc.
-- giving the opening "{" its own line.

these two decisions were made originally "to improve readability", but it is a well established fact that in reality they reduce readability.
maybe the best evidence is python, which very few will deny is *more* readable than either C or perl, while doing away with "{" and "}" altogether.
"{" and "}" are "syntactical sugar" that meant to make the compiler's life easier, but help humans very little.
indentation is sacred and should be observed at all costs, but "{" and "}" are pure noise, as far as readability is concerned, and only serve to distract the reader (at least *this* code reader) from what's important: the content of the statements rather than their bracketing.

I disagree with this as well.
I've seen a lot of code with and without coding braces for single if/if else/else statements and that's usually the part I end up debugging because the original author of that part of the code messed up.
When you use braces, there's no possibility of mistaking where the if block starts/ends, so it certainly helps readability and if anybody else has to come along and clean up after you, it makes it a lot easier for them as well if you use standard braces for every code block.

As for the brace on a new line, that's a big sore point among developers since most learn programming with the brace on the same line in just about every programming language including Javascript and CSS.
With tabs, it's not really critical either way, but if you have the start and end braces on the same tab line, there's no mistaking whether you have tabs opened/closed properly or not, it's always very visible and if you don't focus on hating it so much, you might actually begin to like it

this whole plea is somewhat off-topic, so let me repeat the "on-topic" part:
please publish a full "coding guidelines" for phpbb4, that will contain a full description or the author/copyright/license part.
(and please do away with the atrocious "$Id" and other cvs macros while you are at it).

What do you have against the version control macros? it works for SVN as well as CVS.
Unless you use GIT (which I do) then those are nice to have.

[Highway of Life]

I find that having the $Id$ can cause a lot of conflicts with updates, so I will be happy to see it go as well. It’s nice to have with SVN, but with Git it won’t be needed or used, and phpBB4 is moving to Git.

[naderman]

The curly braces is turning into a bike shed discussion I'll post my proposed coding conventions in here as an RFC this week.

[Dog Cow]

Dog Cow likes curly braces. And on their own lines, too.

[naderman]

As you can see in the coding guidelines RFC I pretty much reversed that position on the @author tag. Git blame and history seem sufficient to document who wrote what. There will of course still be an AUTHORs file as known from previous phpBB versions.

[Highway of Life]

As you can see in the coding guidelines RFC I pretty much reversed that position on the @author tag. Git blame and history seem sufficient to document who wrote what. There will of course still be an AUTHORs file as known from previous phpBB versions.

If the code is distributed outside of Git for any reason (being OSS, it will no doubt happen), then that could become an issue.