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Comment by micampe | Hacker News Reader

> Best case, your code is approved, you can then merge master into your branch and push your branch up to master.

Isn't this backwards? The code should be reviewed after I merged master in my branch, the merge can introduce any number of random issues and conflicts that may substantially change the code being submitted.

Besides, I think the 80-chars limit (especially in ObjC) is ridiculous, probably just put there by terminal diehards that make life harder for everyone else.

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An 80 character limit is great if you like looking at multiple source files side-by-side.

I do that a lot and I found long lines annoying on an 11" MacBook Air, which has a 1366px horizontal resolution, and I use a fairly large font size at 12pt. I want to believe most developers use a larger display for their day to day work.

(bonch, you’ve been hit by the hellbanning BS: your comments are invisible)

The limit is flexible at the project level, many projects use a 100-char limit. And it's only for code, not for xml/json/string etc. files. And while it adds some extra line breaks to your code, it does improve readability a lot, particularly in visual diff views.

I imagine the with a code base the size of Google you code is constantly being added so you have no hope of merging with the master branch and getting the code reviewed before someone else changes it.

Not really - there are thousands of engineers and bazillions of files in the code base, but any single file you're working on is still unlikely to have hundreds of other engineers frantically changing it at the same time as you. The last company I worked at had 8 other engineers (at the most) and if anything I probably saw more merge conflicts there.

Even if multiple people change the same file at the same time, it does not necessarily require a manual merge, except when the changes conflict with each other (e.g. add a line at the same position in base and head branches), so the automatic merge does its job most of the times.

Definitely - I'm guessing you would need to submit for merge for review as well? Maybe someone from Google can clear it up. The merge would be pretty likely to break things like alphabetical ordering that seems to be a terrible no-no at Google. ;)

Normally those minor merge changes do not require another round of review, but it's up to the original author of the changelist to ask for it, in case the difference is substantial. Engineers are trusted to use their best judgement in such situations.

There's often some bounced revisions back and forth chatting about the code line comments, implementing the requested changes, and finishing the approval in similar systems I've used. You wouldn't want to merge master 5 times per change.

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