[MERGE] whitespace normalization

[Colin D Bennett]

On Thu, 24 Jul 2008 10:30:40 -0500
"Benjamin Peterson" <musiccomposition at gmail.com> wrote:

> I ran reindent.py (from the main Python distribution) on all the
> Bazaar sources. The resulting bundle was too large for the list so
> please see the public branch at
> http://code.launchpad.net/~musiccomposition/bzr/reindent<http://code.launchpad.net/%7Emusiccomposition/bzr/reindent>

While I understand your desire for absolutely uniform code
formatting--I have been tempted to do large re-formatting changes on
projects with a lot of inconsistently formatted code before--I really
think the vast majority of the reformatting changes introduced by
reindent.py on this branch are of no importance for all practical
purposes (a space at the end of a line, especially), but they do
impact many, many lines of code.  Sure, it is nice to be able to run
reindent.py on a file you have just edited in order to make your code
conform to The Right Style, but I don't think that sweeping
reformatting changes are worth the cost of spurious conflicts in this
case.

Perhaps for projects just starting out, implementing a Bazaar pre-commit
hook to re-indent all files before being committed would be nice.  This
way things would just stay consistent.  However, for Bazaar, we have a
lot of code and lots of people working on stuff, upon whom we don't
want to cast undue merge pain.

Regards,
Colin