[MERGE] whitespace normalization

[Robert Collins]

On Fri, 2008-07-25 at 12:02 +1000, Andrew Bennetts wrote:
> Ben Finney wrote:
> > Aaron Bentley <aaron at aaronbentley.com> writes:
> > 
> > > Aaron Bentley has voted reject.
> > > Status is now: Vetoed
> > > Comment:
> > > Changes like this cause spurious conflicts.
> > 
> > As do differences between files caused by *not* normalising the
> > whitespace in the code base.
> 
> Do you have any evidence that this has happened to people working on bzr?  I
> certainly don't recall encountering this myself, so I think your concern is
> hypothetical.  Maybe there's something different about how other people work
> that I'm not aware of?
> 
> However, doing a large change like this *will* cause conflicts with most, if not
> all, currently unmerged changes.  There's over 20 branches pending in Bundle
> Buggy alone, let alone changes that are still too immature to have been formally
> proposed for merging yet.
> 
> It seems counter-productive to me to induce conflicts in an effort to avoid
> conflicts that we don't have!
> 
> > If the code has been allowed to become inconsistent with whitespace,
> > it seems the only long-term solution is to declare an
> > automaticaly-checkable policy, convert the code base, and reject any
> > future commit that doesn't conform.
> 
> You're presupposing that a solution is required, i.e. that the current state is
> a problem.  I'm not convinced that this is the case.  The current high rate of
> changes is evidence that it isn't problem.

Its not evidence that its not a problem; its just evidence that some
fraction (perhaps 100%) of contributors are getting past it.

Its possible to do an automerge of the proposed branch against
everything in BB and see how much fail we'd get :). I think that that
would be interesting and give an assessment for how risky this branch
is.

-Rob
-- 
GPG key available at: <http://www.robertcollins.net/keys.txt>.
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