licensecheck: improvements

[Dmitry Smirnov]

Hi James,

Thanks for your reply.

On Wed, 10 Oct 2012 14:37:03 James McCoy wrote:
> From the brief glance that I have had at the patches, there are plenty
> of unnecessary changes mixed in among the useful changes.

I reckon we're all have different opinions regarding what's useful. :)

I think all the changes are necessary even those we could skip for now like 
help deduplication. In the end we all want clean and consistent code so why 
not start improving now?
Please be more specific regarding what's useful for you and what isn't.


> A new contributor should expect to adapt to a project's existing style
> and guidelines, not the other way around.  If you want to change those,
> then you can raise a discussion about it.  

So far I'm focusing on licensecheck only. At this time its code looks very 
messy and inconsistent with different coding styles stitched together often 
violating best practice.
If I go against any guidelines please explain specifically and I will correct.


> Just throwing patches over
> the wall and expecting us to take them wholesale because you've already
> done the work isn't going to fly.

Contrary that's the only way to make it work. :)

We may spent ages discussing changes that nobody actually did.
I have neither time nor enough patience to obtain pre-approval from all team 
members for everything that I'd like to do.

The approach I found working for other teams is to start implementing 
something useful and bring it to discussion as it is much easier to have a 
look at proposed implementation to identify potential improvements rather than 
discuss in abstract.

I'm prepared to reconsider some of the changes and I'm open to feedback and 
ideas. For example we need to agree how --help output will look.
After all this is easy to change as long as we're using the right 
implementation i.e. Pod::Usage.

What I'm not prepared for is for nearly complete dismissal on the ground that 
"it's not perfect". (What is perfect in this world anyway?)

I don't understand how we can be in harmony with current messy situation and 
show so much reluctance toward useful improvements at the same time. That 
feels like double standards.


> 
> As far as project membership, that's not necessary to contribute.  Patch
> sets (as you've done here) or a git repository to pull from will work
> too.

Absolutely. I understand that. After all you don't know me and therefore I 
should earn your trust first.

Regards,
Dmitry.