Re: Patch: grep ^func

["Eli Zaretskii" <eliz at is dot elta dot co dot il>]

> Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2001 09:15:29 -0800
> From: Michael Snyder <msnyder@redhat.com>
> 
> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> > In general, I think gratuitous changes in whitespace should be
> > avoided, since they get in the way when you need to figure out what
> > _real_ changes in the code happened since the last time you looked.
> 
> Strongly disagree.  Some of the code in GDB is a real mess, and
> I am devoted to the goal that it will look better (as time 
> becomes available.

I don't see any disagreement, just a terminology problem ;-).  Fixing
code that looks like a car crash is not ``gratuitous changes'' in my
book.

However, removing a newline from a comment in a case like the one in
point, where the newline was put on purpose is IMHO nowhere near
fixing messy code.

> Clean-up patches should be made separately from bug-fix
> patches, but they should NOT be avoided.  CVS allows you
> to separate them, Eli.  Avoiding doing clean-up because it
> makes using diff more difficult would be a bad bad thing, 
> IMO.

Please note: I was talking specifically about whitespace, and then
only about gratuitous changes.  This explicitly excludes changes meant
to bring GDB's code to GNU standards.

Such gratuitous whitespace changes make it hard to review patches
posted here for comments.  Instead of simply reading the patch, one
needs to actually patch the files, then look at the old and new
versions with some tool such as Ediff.  IMHO, making the reviewers'
lives more complicated for no good reason is nor a good idea, if we
want the approval process to be efficient.