Madagascar development blog

The Madagascar project has been registered with Ohloh in order to get free code metrics. Visit the Madagascar code analysis page on Ohloh to find out many things, such as: what types of software licenses besides GPL 2+ are in Madagascar; how many non-blank, non-comment lines are written in each programming language; and to see an evolution of the total number of lines over time! Apparently we have more than 152 000 lines of C. Awesome.

Especially nice and encouraging is the graph with the steady growth of number of source code lines over time. According to Ohloh: "It's generally a good sign to see sustained, constant activity over a long period of time. This means that people are continually updating it (fixing bugs and/or improving features), and that the project has staying power." The official Ohloh assessment about Madagascar is: "Mature, well-established codebase; Large, active development team".

Ohloh also lets enthusiastic users vote for the package, so that popular packages become even more visible! Vote today so that we get even more users and developers, even more bug reports, documentation and contributions, and overall a more useful package!

Having a known maximum source code line length is a very useful thing. This way, code fragments can be automatically included into other kinds of media without breaking formatting rules. Coding standards for most large, established software projects (either open-source or proprietary) explicitly mention line length.

However, what is a good line length limit? The 80-character limit is very widespread, but how does it compare to what peoples have naturally been writing? To find out, I used a little Python script (adm/line_len_hist.py) to count line lengths for various types of files in the Madagascar code base. Pictures follow below, for all source code files (including SConstruct files) and the most prevalent file types. To my surprise, the 80-character threshold is quite relevant, and it might be worth having it as an explicit coding style suggestion on the wiki, to help new contributors!