On 7 Mar 2009, at 12:56, Santiago Gala wrote:
El vie, 06-03-2009 a las 08:13 -0800, Adam Winer escribió:
What is the advantage of removing trailing whitespace? I can't see a
reason to do it at all. Unlike removing unnecessary imports (say),
it
doesn't improve the codebase in any objective manner.
The typical reason for removing whitespace is that whitespace changes
cause puzzling spurious diffs, where nothing changes but some
whitespace
change gets committed. So, while it does not improve the codebase
viewed
statically, useless whitespace are prone to change in time, and those
changes pollute the sequence of changesets that make the history of
the
codebase. Hence the reason why Ian asked for a separate commit for
whitespace cleanup.
You put it far better than I did.
Thank you
Ian
As for benefits of not having them, the simplest one is that
codereview
and other diff tools won't flag trailing whitespace and whitespace
between tabs in red in ulterior diffs involving lines with them. But
whitespace cleanups are only worthwhile if new commits are disciplined
to not bring them in again.
Regards
Santiago
Cheers,
Adam
On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 3:11 AM, Vincent Siveton
<[email protected]> wrote:
The majority of the source code had already removed trailing
whitespace. Some statistics:
- around 600 java files
- only around 140 java files don't removed trailing whitespace
So, IMHO removing trailing whitespace is the way to go.
WDYT?
Cheers,
Vincent
2009/3/5 Adam Winer <[email protected]>:
Instead of 2 commits, could you change it to not remove trailing
whitespaces? It unnecessarily obfuscates history, especially when
there's trailing whitespace on non-blank lines. This is
typically an
option that can be adjusted in an IDE.
-- Adam
On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 3:21 PM, Vincent Siveton <[email protected]
> wrote:
Hi Adam,
2009/3/5 Adam Winer <[email protected]>:
I see a lot of whitespace changes with each submission,
apparently
around blank lines. Any way you could avoid making these
changes?
It's much harder to read diffs like this.
Yeah, my IDE removes trailing whitespaces. I will do 2 commits
next time.
Cheers,
Vincent
