Re: [PATCH] Reformat sysdeps/x86/libc-start.c

[Joseph Myers <joseph at codesourcery dot com>]

On Fri, 3 Nov 2017, Carlos O'Donell wrote:

> The point I made is not about any general changes, but about a specific
> subset of changes, namely coding standard cleanups and trivial changes.

The difficulty is that there are many subtleties regarding the coding 
standards and it would be easy for someone to produce a very large patch 
making changes that superficially follow the standards but are not in fact 
desirable.

* E.g. if someone globally added spaces before '(' before we'd explicitly 
documented the rule about macros that logically expand to a single symbol 
name.

* E.g. if someone applied the rule for preprocessor indentation without 
following the rule that the outer multiple-include guard does not count 
for the purposes of indentation for nested directives.

* E.g. if someone reformatted a file shared with another project without 
considering if the variations from normal glibc practice are to facilitate 
sharing with that project.

The effect of that is that even if we think some such changes are obvious 
and appropriate for commit without review, they should cease to become 
obvious if the patch, or the total set of such patches from one 
contributor in some period, gets too big, to ensure there is time for 
issues to be raised before the same mistake has been made too many times.

> How long is too long? 1h, 2h, 4h, 1day? What if you're working on the
> weekend cleaning stuff up and nobody else is around to ack your cleanup?

What I suggest above would imply we do *not* want someone committing a 
large set of cleanups over the weekend while no-one is looking at that, 
precisely because there could be a global issue with one person's 
understanding of the standards that should be pointed out before many such 
changes have gone in.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com