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Comment by StellarScience | Hacker News Reader

Great points, I'd just add:

> A lot of inconsistency is the result of unwillingness to fix other people's stuff

Agree, so we find it best to practice "no code ownership" or better yet "shared code ownership." So we try to think of it all as "our stuff" rather than "other people's stuff." Maybe you just joined the project, and are working around code that hasn't been touched in 5 years, but we're all responsible for improving the code and making it better as we go.

That requires a high trust environment; I don't know if it could work for Firefox where you may have some very part-time contributors. But having documented standards, plus clang-format and clang-tidy to automate some of the simpler things, also goes a long way.

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> That requires a high trust environment; I don't know if it could work for Firefox where you may have some very part-time contributors.

Ironically, that's why it works for Firefox. Contributors follow a power law. There are a lot of one-shot contributors. They'll be doing mostly spot fixes or improvements, and their code speaks for itself. Very little trust is needed. We aren't going to be accepting binary test blobs from them. There are relatively few external contributors who make frequent contributions, and they've built up trust over time -- not by reporting to the right manager or being a friend of the CTO, but through their contributions and discussions. Code reviews implicitly factor in the level of trust in the contributor. All in all, the open nature of Firefox causes it to be fundamentally built on trust, to a larger extent than seems possible in most proprietary software companies. (There, people are less likely to be malicious, but for large scale refactoring it's about trusting someone's technical direction. Having a culture where trust derives from contribution not position means it's reasonable to assume that trusted people have earned that trust for reasons relevant to the code you're looking at.)

There are people who, out of the blue, submit large changes with good code. We usually won't accept them. We [the pool of other contributors, paid or not] aren't someone's personal code maintenance team. Code is a liability.

> But having documented standards, plus clang-format and clang-tidy to automate some of the simpler things, also goes a long way.

100% agree. It's totally worth it even if you disagree with the specific formatting decisions made.

> All in all, the open nature of Firefox causes it to be fundamentally built on trust, to a larger extent than seems possible in most proprietary software companies.

Nice! We're still small so we somehow can keep that level of trust, but I always worry about how things may change for the worse as we grow. Mimicking the open source model as much as we can, even within a small private company, has worked well for us so far.

> > ... clang-format and clang-tidy to automate some of the simpler things, also goes a long way.

> 100% agree. It's totally worth it even if you disagree with the specific formatting decisions made.

So true! 5-6 years ago we had to make open source contributions to both clang-format and clang-tidy for several months to get them to support closer to our preferred style before we could get the "ok, close enough" buy-in across the company to implement automated formatting. (Mostly bug fixes for evidently rare flag combinations, but also a few small new features.)

In retrospect it was completely unnecessary - simply relying on automated formatting is sooo much better than any specifics of the formatting. I'm still glad we did though, as it made both tools better. We earned the maintainers' trust with a few early PRs, and remained active contributors for a while, but haven't contributed much lately.

(Posted on Firefox mobile... Thanks!)

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