That's a coding convention (which I don't like myself, so I won't comment whether is good or bad, for the sake of avoiding flames), but it is not a good coding *practice*. A good coding practice is to load the resources from the classpath, which this patch is about.

There was a very nice talk on Monday about code reviews. It explictly mention not to discuss coding conventions and leave it to automated means, as they make code reviews both long and unsavory. I'll send the video around when it's online.

The fact you're holding this patch due to this puzzles me to no end. If you want to enforce coding conventions so rigorously, please post them together with the project.