From: David Crossley > It might sound pedantic, but it is about efficiency. > > I have wasted a lot of time during my committer life with > confusing patches that contain mainly whitespace changes. Not > to criticise the patcher or their tools, but today was a > classic. With some manual tweaks to whitespace, i managed to > bring one diff down from 450 lines to 120 lines. > > What caused this grief? Well the files in cvs had > inconsistent whitespace, most indentations were 4-space, some > were 3-space, some line of text had two spaces between words > rather than one, and other spurious issues. Now when the > developer edited that file, their text editor must have tried > to fix the whitespace, but in many cases made it worse. > > Therefore the diff was full of clutter. If i had committed > it then no-one would have been able to review the changes. > It would look like almost every line had changed. Also the > cvs files would have been in a worse state and then perpetuate it. > > I suppose that it is a dream, but does anybody know about a > tool that would automatically apply say 4-space indentation > and whitespace clean up? We could apply that to our whole cvs > say once per month.
Maybe http://checkstyle.sourceforge.net/ could help here. The big advantage: it has an Eclipse plug-in. Cheers, Reinhard
