test_source harmful?

[Martin Pool]

2009/2/27 Ben Finney <bignose+hates-spam at benfinney.id.au>:

>> This ignores the issue: Trailing whitespace is not structurally bad;
>> it doesn't cause bugs; it might _rarely_ cause merge conflicts.
>> Checking that something unimportant is set to a particular value is
>> still checking something unimportant.
>
> Is it true, though, that the Bazaar team considers trailing
> whitespace, and the problems caused by it, to be unimportant?

(These sound, probably unintentionally, like rhetorical or leading
questions.)  If people have trouble doing reviews or merges or
landings, that's important.  If there is trailing whitespace and it
has no effects like that then it's unimportant; the computer doesn't
care.

John said on irc

>> I should also mention the discussion started because of people who had editors that stripped trailing whitespace on save and then aaron asked people to explicitly not do that as it made the diff harder to review and could cause conflicts in the future and without a test, that sort of thing sort of 'creeps' in

I think the easiest thing is: ask people to arrange with their editors
not to add whitespace on lines they change and also not to strip it
off, except in patches that only do that stripping..

>> But trailing whitespace doesn't matter in terms of quality any more
>> than too much or too little VWS matters. We don't have tests for
>> those things because they don't matter as far as the test suite is
>> concerned. The test suite exists to serve us in developing robust
>> high quality code for our users.

That makes me smile just a bit because you've pointed out vertical
whitespace non-conformances in so many of my patches.  It's actually a
bit more justifiable because at least humans can see vws and it does
make a small difference to readability.

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>