Salut Renaud,
merci for volunteering to maintain exim.
Renaud Allard wrote on Tue, Apr 17, 2018 at 02:55:56PM +0200:
> On 04/17/2018 02:52 PM, Stuart Henderson wrote:
>> Honestly I would leave the srandom bits in. No major objection, but they
>> don't hurt and it will save you maintenance hassle merging patches when
>> they fix the typo in the comment you are removing in this patch!
>> Minimal patches are usually better.
> That's not really a big hassle as I will probably make more changes
> (pledge anyone?). Besides, I would prefer not to create a variable if it
> can be trivially avoided.
There is no doubt room for some personal decisions when maintaining
a port, yet i *recommend* to adhere to those principles that are
well-established across the ports tree as a whole. "Keep patches
minimal" is relatively high on that list, right below "make sure
it works and has no security holes".
Even if *you* don't lose track of what you are doing with additional
cosmetic patches, there are three reasons to still avoid them.
1. Not only the maintainer works on a port. People like
ajacoutot, espie, naddy, sthen, and some others have to do
sweeps of the tree at times, touching hundreds, sometimes
thousands of ports at the same time. Ports directories that
contain unnecessary files and files that are of unnecessary
size can be a nuisance in such situations because they may
have to be looked at. Even a few seconds spent for inspection
are a problem when you have to cover thousands of ports.
2. Maintainers change. I'm not saying you are a jerk and will
take up maintenance of the port and then run off next week
(though it does happen occasionally that people promise
a lot, start changing things, and then leave a half-finished
mess behind - even i have left behind some construction sites
of that kind over time). But at some point, your interests
will probably change, and you will probably shift the focus
of your work to some other ports, or to base, or whatever.
When that time comes, you will *not* enjoy the work of
bringing the port back to normal standards, and others will
also be annoyed if they try to pick it up and first have to
wade through unnecessary patches. It has caused problems
in the past because people didn't expect the patches were
really pointless and spent considerable time fruitlessly
trying to understand what their point was before finally
deleting them.
3. Users sometimes look at patches, for various reasons.
Have pity on them and save their time.
If you have excessive energy and want to polish exim, work
with upstream. Regarding style, it may not be possible to
reconcile OpenBSD and upstream conventions, and in that case,
upstream takes precendence - tough luck... Still, sometimes,
working with upstream can improve stuff for all.
If you have excessive energy and insist on polishing turds, do so
in base, not in ports. If you do substantial work on something in
base, polishing the turds in the vicinity as well is appreciated.
But avoid turd polishing in ports patches, please.
Yours,
Ingo
