I think we need to develop a "coding standards" document
as the first step of a code cleanup adventure (and
to the extent that there are controversial issues there might
need to be some TIPs; I would define controversial as
something someone cares enough about to write a TIP on).
It's definitely the case that many of the bad examples
in the toolkit are copied into new packages on a regular
basis and cleaning things up would make the toolkit
both more robust and more pleasant to work with.
Dirk's point is a good one though, unless there are some
people willing to do something besides just post on the
forums about this it's unlikely to matter one way or the other. I will try to pull a draft together based on the
various threads we have had in the past
but I will be sorely disappointed if those of you who seem to care about this stuff are not willing to wade in and fix it.
The things can think of off the top of my head are
datamodel create scripts, using namespaces, seperation of
markup and code (and especially removing tcl from .adp files), package structure (which mostly needs to be updated,
to be in line with tip 12), the ad_proc, ad_page_contract, ad_library javadoc tags, and declaring things public or private.
Also, I think we need a TIP for how we are going to remove
deprecated functions (a la set_form_variables_string_trim_DoubleApos and util_PrettySexManWoman), since I would really like to
clean out some of the really crufty stuff. I think
remove anything two releases after it is -warn (i.e.
remove the 4.6.3 -warn things in 5.1 and the 5.0 -warn things in 5.2) but that is probably something we need to talk about more and make a formal decision on.
