On 6/22/06, John Haxby <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
DM Smith wrote: > 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. > > [snip] > Such a change is most likely unnecessary. Others, probably including me, would disagree. Changes to make the source have a consistent style and a consistent layout are not uncommon.
I agree with you 100% that consistent style and layout are important. Look through the Linux kernel change logs for "whitespace
clean up" (or "white space" and "cleanup", spaces are optional :-)). The GNU glibc maintainers will reject patches that do not conform to the coding style for glibc -- and that includes stylistic choices like the ones you mentioned (that I cut in the interests of brevity).
And I also agree here that the committers have the responsibility to be the gatekeepers of that.
Similarly, and I'm struggling to keep vaguely on-topic here, the Java 1.5 iteration constructs are functionally no different to their 1.4 equivalent. But to dismiss the 1.5 changes as "syntactic sugar" or "fluff" is to denigrate their importance to the reliability and maintenance of software.
In an earlier note, I suggested that there needs to be guidance as to how Java 5 constructs are to be incorporated into code, contrib and core. (Sooner or later, core will change to Java 5) Or does anything go?
