[Dovecot] coding techniques

[Timo Sirainen]

On Tue, 2006-09-05 at 17:20 +0100, David Lee wrote:
> Firstly, many 'if' statements having a single statement (whether in then
> or else part) are currently written in a short-cut fashion:
> 
>    if (condition)
>       statement 1;
>    else
>       statement 2;
> 
> This, though technically legal, is potentially lethal when inserting (say)
> debugging statements.  Without diligence it is all to easy to produce:
> 
>    if (condition)
>       debug 1a;
>       statement 1;
>       debug 1b;
>    else
>       debug 2a;
>       statement 2;
>       debug 2b;

If the editor supports automatic indentation properly (like at least
mine does), it's practically impossible to do that accidentally.

> Could I suggest that the relevant brackets be always used as a matter of
> course?  Something like:
> 
>    if (condition) {
>       statement 1;
>    } else {
>       statement 2;
>    }

Sorry, but I really hate looking at code which looks like that.. :)

> Secondly, code duplication.  To give one example: 'get_var_expand_table()'
> appears in both 'deliver/deliver.c' and 'master/mail-process.c'.  (There
> is also a similar looking function in 'auth/auth-request.c'.)  Perhaps
> consideration should be given to merging such instances.  For instance, my
> woes with "%i"-expansion being treated differently in mail-reading and
> mail-delivery would likely never have arisen if common code had been used.

I try to avoid duplication as much as possible. In this case there are
two reasons why duplication is done:

1) There's really no good place to put this little common code, so it's
easier to just duplicate it..

2) Deliver is still a pretty ugly hack. Hopefully for Dovecot v2.0 I've
rewritten it to work differently so that it won't handle the variable
expanding itself at all.
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