Josh just came up with what I believe is the best explanation of if and when to reformat - I think this applies equally well to sources and docs.
I'd added only one caviat - changes to the format should always -preceed- the patch to the actual code, and there shouldn't be format changes if there is no work to commit that the existing format didn't interfere with. Note that +/- whitespace patches (including newlines) are _simple_ to ignore. Changes to anything else (capitalization, etc) are most definately not. I personally reformat often - but only if it 1. increases legibility in 2. a module I'm actively refactoring. But Joshes' explanation is great :) Bill From: "Joshua Slive" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Apache Documentation Project" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, September 04, 2001 9:51 PM > On Tue, 4 Sep 2001, Rich Bowen wrote: > > > I've been using tidy, from the w3c, for a while now, to do > > pretty-reformatting of HTML documents. One of the things that it does is > > lower-case HTML tags. I was wondering, in light of comments made a week > > or two ago, whether it would be worthwhile to do this with files in the > > docs as I a working with them? > > > > The downside is that it will create a diff in which every line in the > > file changes (in most cases), and I did not want to start submitting > > enormous diffs, without running this past folks first. > > A similar question just threatened to start a flamewar on [EMAIL PROTECTED] > ;-) > > My opinion is that it is not a big deal either way. (It is not like > source code where you potentially mess up everyone's patches.) But > I prefer not to unnecessarily reformat. The only time I do reformat is > when the existing format makes the doc very hard to work with. > > In other words, if it makes it significantly easier for you to work > with, then go ahead and reformat. But don't reformat just for the > sake of consistency. (I don't care about consistency here because > it is invisible to the end user.) > > Of course, others are bound to have other opinions. > > Joshua. > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > >
