On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 08:19:20AM -0400, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 7:18 AM, Stefan Sperling <stsp_at_elego.de> wrote:
> > On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 01:00:45PM +0200, Nick Stolwijk wrote:
> >> In all Unix like configuration files, the # means that line is a
> >> comment. Often the value mentioned on the line is not the default, so
> >> uncommenting the line will give you the other value.
>
> Stefan, Nick is mistaken about this. Review any number of common tools
> like Sendmail, Bind, and OpenSSH, Makefile for thousands of GNU
> projects, etc. Nick, you're going to have real trouble if you rely on
> this as expected practice. The "common practice" in the Free Software
> Foundation (maintainers of gcc and emacs and gzip), for example, is
> precisely the reverse. *Defaults* are commented out, and uncommenting
> them does *nothing*. Uncommenting and editing them changes things.
I committed the change more in response to this entire thread than Nick's
remark. But yes, I don't think there is even a consistent pattern in
Subversion's own configuration files. Some commented options seem to
be set to default values, while others aren't. That's why it's important
to mention default values in the comments.
Note that in 1.6.x the generated config file says:
# enable-rep-sharing = false
while in trunk it says:
# enable-rep-sharing = true
And I'm not going to dig up the reason for that :)
Received on 2011-05-24 16:17:03 CEST