Date: Mon, 10 Feb 2003 22:44:48 -0500 From: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> To: "Simon L. Nielsen" <simon@nitro.dk> Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Trailing whitespace in FreeBSD Message-ID: <p05200f0dba6e1f0c469f@[128.113.24.47]> In-Reply-To: <FBCF4A31-3D61-11D7-9D83-000393C6E688@queasyweasel.com> References: <FBCF4A31-3D61-11D7-9D83-000393C6E688@queasyweasel.com>
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>On Monday, February 10, 2003, at 03:00 PM, Simon L. Nielsen wrote: >> >>I have noticed that that several FreeBSD files (.c, .h and so >>on) have trailing whitespace (spaces/tabs after last charecter >>on a line). >> >>Should I send patches for this, or is it not important to "fix"? It might be "nice" to fix, in some abstract sense, but it drives developers nuts if you modify a file that they've checked out a local copy of. They go to commit their change back in (a change which is usually something more significant than a damn trailing blank or tab character), and the commit runs into a conflict because someone else has "cleaned up" the source code. So, this is something that a developer might want to do if they are going to be working on some source file anyway. However, it can really irritate a lot of developers if it is done across the entire src tree "just because it is easy to do". Further, IMO it doesn't really help the FreeBSD project at all. Imagine a new release which said "And now with less blanks in the source code!" for the release notes. Our end-users would think we are nuts. It is better to tackle a harder project -- one which has an actual payback to the end users -- instead of looking for something this easy to do. Just my 2 cents. -- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@gilead.netel.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or gad@freebsd.org Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or drosih@rpi.edu To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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