Re: spaces before tabs

At 8:51 AM +0000 3/15/04, Colin Percival wrote:
>At 06:25 15/03/2004, Bruce Evans wrote:
>>On Sun, 14 Mar 2004, Colin Percival wrote:
>
>>  > Should I clean these up, or is it not worth bloating the
>>  > repository for such cosmetic fixes?
>>
>>It's too painful to do all at once IMO.
>
>   Painful for whom?  I've got a 2.4MB patch sitting in front
>of me which fixes most of these.

Painful for other people who are working on other changes, which
they have checked-out in their own local files.  They get their
own changes tested, go to commit them, and then find they have to
rework the entire thing due to conflicts with a cosmetic patch.

It's only happened to me a few times, and for some of those it
happened for cosmetic fixes that I had backed 100% before they
were committed.  That doesn't change how irritating it is when
you go to commit something *you've* worked on, and realize you
have to rework and retest everything that you've done because of
some grand sweep of cosmetic changes that someone else committed.

[note that I certainly do like to do cosmetic cleanups, but I
usually do them only if I have some other reason to be working
on a given set of files]

I think that cosmetic fixes "just for the sake of" cosmetic fixes
is much too easy.  If you have something *real* to do with some
set of files, then by all means clean them up before you begin.
But don't do cosmetic changes just so you can say that you've done
something.  If you are not going to be the responsible-developer
for a given set of files after doing some grand-sweep cosmetic
change, then don't change that set of files.  Not unless you get
advance buy-in from all the developers you will be effecting.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad_at_gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad_at_freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih_at_rpi.edu