I would like to see us address both concerns by adopting > some build-time tools to check/enforce whitespace conventions in our > configuration files, which would allow us to incur a one-time > whitespace change to improve readability and provide stable formatting > going forward.
+1. Marvin, do you, or does anyone else here, have experience with such tools, recommendation of what tool? CAS 4 would be a good release to be incurring that one-time standardize-the-whitespace cost, since the 3-->4 version number change helps adopters to have more accepting expectations about degree of change / upgrade configuration change pain. On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 10:23 AM, Marvin Addison <[email protected]>wrote: > > A piece of general feedback when trying to upgrade our systems from > > 3.4.12 to 3.5.1. Maintainability of maven overlay customizations would > > benefit immensely from not doing unnecessary white-space modifications > > in all XML-files, like changing indentation from 4 to 2 spaces etc. > > I appreciate your making this recommendation. I myself have cursed > whitespace changes in XML for the frustration it causes when trying to > diff a customized login webflow for important changes that need to be > applied locally. On balance, we've been fairly sloppy with respect to > whitespace and formatting generally in our XML configuration files to > the point that it can impair readability for developers and first-time > deployers. I would like to see us address both concerns by adopting > some build-time tools to check/enforce whitespace conventions in our > configuration files, which would allow us to incur a one-time > whitespace change to improve readability and provide stable formatting > going forward. > > In the interim you may find a tool such as xmldiff helpful. The folks > in the Shib community recommend it for use cases such as this and they > have as much experience as anyone with complex XML configuration > files. > > M > > -- > You are currently subscribed to [email protected] as: > [email protected] > To unsubscribe, change settings or access archives, see > http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/JSG/cas-dev > -- You are currently subscribed to [email protected] as: [email protected] To unsubscribe, change settings or access archives, see http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/JSG/cas-dev
