ARI/Commit rules

[Phil Muldoon <pmuldoon@redhat.com>]

I was writing a patch today, and I once again arrived at the: "Should I
use X or Y for this operation" dilemma.  There are a lot of unwritten
rules about programming usage in GDB (See ARI mails), and sometimes
maintainers don't catch them.  This is inevitable with a project this
size and age.  I have come to fear the post-commit ARI warnings ;)

This lead me to think, is it possible to distil this post-commit hook
script to a user installable script somewhere?  If GDB used git as the
primary repository we could just make it a pre-commit hook, and a user
script would not be needed.  But as GDB uses CVS I do not think
this is possible.

This would help ease the reviewing load.  We could put a link to the
script in the contributors guide, and a "RUN THIS FIRST" preamble.

Also we could perhaps encode some formatting rules in there as well.
Blank line after variable decl, two spaces after a period, space
in-between function and brackets, etc etc.  These nits always trip me up.

What do you think?

Cheers

Phil