[gdal-dev] Re: OGR Driver for Norwegian SOSI standard

[Even Rouault]

Selon Mateusz Łoskot <mateusz at loskot.net>:

> On 17 November 2011 14:28, Even Rouault <even.rouault at mines-paris.org> wrote:
> >> My main question is in how far the included code has to follow RFC 8. It
> >> would be quite a task to make it follow the gdal-Hungarian prefix dialect,
> >> or even to translate variables and method names to plain English.
> >
> > Those requirements apply certainly for the core of GDAL, but they can be
> relaxed
> > for drivers. I also don't believe that it would be reasonable to ask for
> > rewriting all variable names and translating them.
>
> IMHO, it should be strict and should require English only names in code.
> It's important for maintenance in future.

I've checked, but current RFC's don't mandate use of English (perhaps they
should be updated), but that would help indeed... That said, maintenance is not
only about which language is used (*), it's also about knowledge of how the code
works and the details of the file format, hence my remark of bringing in people
with the code.

Drivers are a bit of particular case. If at some point they become an
unmanageable pain, we can just disable them without affecting the working of the
rest of the software. However, I'm definitely not for starting on the basis of
only a big code drop without the associated support behind it.

(*) I daily read code with function names, variable names and comments in my
native language, and it doesn't make it intrinsically maintenable !

>
> Best regards,
> --
> Mateusz Loskot, http://mateusz.loskot.net
> Charter Member of OSGeo, http://osgeo.org
> Member of ACCU, http://accu.org
>