On Jun 22, 2006, at 4:31 AM, John Haxby wrote:
DM Smith wrote:
Generally open source projects have a policy to change as little
of the file
as possible, only changing what is necessary.
Hmmm. Necessary by what criterion? Necessary to make, say,
Lucene exploit the new interator constructs to avoid run-time type-
checking? Necessary to make the code more readable? Necessary
to prevent use with Java 1.4? :-)
I'm not sure I've ever seen a policy expressed in that way --
patches generally should be clear, concise and do what they're
intended to do, but that doesn't necessarily mean minimising the
size of the patch and it doesn't necessarily mean keeping the
source compatible with some old compiler or environment.
I wasn't trying to be argumentative (with this statement). I probably
stated it badly.
I simply meant that the change that is being made should be done in
such a way that one applying the patch can readily see what is being
changed. The most common case of unnecessary change is that of
whitespace. Changing indentation, changing the placement of curly
braces, reordering methods and variables and so forth are all
unnecessary.
There are structural changes to the code that can be done that do not
change the behavior of the code. Some developers feel strongly about
one construct over another. For example take the following example:
public int f(int x)
{
if (x > 0)
return x * 2;
else
return x * -2;
}
Some think its dumb that there is an else clause as above.
public int f(int x)
{
if (x > 0)
return x * 2;
return x * -2;
}
Others feel strongly that there should only be one exit in a method:
public int f(int x)
{
int ret = 0;
if (x > 0)
ret = x * -2;
else
ret = x * -2;
return ret;
}
Some like brevity:
public int f(int x) { return x*(x>0?2:-2;}
Such a change is most likely unnecessary.
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