emacs-devel
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: gratuitous changes


From: Kim F. Storm
Subject: Re: gratuitous changes
Date: 02 Feb 2003 14:59:42 +0100
User-agent: Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.3.50

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

> On Fri, 31 Jan 2003, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> 
> > I am responsible for a fair bit of spurious changes in that I often
> > remove trailing whitespace when I come across it and thus end
> > up comitting changes to more than the places where I've actually
> > modified the code.
> > 
> > But I still think that what happened with keyboard.c is bad:
> > turning every whitespace-only line into an empty line.
> 
> I generally dislike unnecessary whitespace changes as well: for one 
> thing, they make diffs much harder to grasp.

And merging a nightmare.  Making cosmetic changes to source code
on the trunk of a CVS project tree often makes it much harder to merge
changes from a branch to the trunk.  E.g. when it's time to merge the
emacs unicode branch to the head, there is a bigger risk of merge
conflicts in code which really doesn't differ except for white space.

> 
> However, I must say that when I brought up this issue in the past in the 
> context of Emacs development, most of other developers didn't feel it was 
> that bad.  So, as extreme as this particular case is, at least in 
> principle, Emacs development does not seem to discourage such gratuitous 
> changes.  At least it didn't until now.
> 

Maybe because we have been spared from the troubles of large-scale
merging of branches...

-- 
Kim F. Storm <address@hidden> http://www.cua.dk





reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]