[webkit-dev] Whitespace changes

[Dirk Pranke]

On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 11:55 AM, Peter Kasting<pkasting at google.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 10:43 PM, David Levin <levin at chromium.org> wrote:
>>
>> fwiw, I know that the check-webkit-style checks for trailing whitespace
>> (and I approved that change - sorry), but I think it should probably be
>> removed.
>
> Since opinions were requested, I'm in favor of both the check-webkit-style
> change here and Adam's patch, as well as other cleanup patches.  Maintaining
> a cultural attitude that is widely positive towards cleanup makes people
> feel less reticent about cleaning up, and taking ownership of, code;
> frowning on certain types of cleanup makes people less likely to do _any_
> cleanup.
> As far as blame annotations, I don't mind paging past a cleanup change when
> trying to do archaeology on code; I have to go past enough other changes
> already that one more doesn't make much of a difference overall.

+1

I see little point in having coding standards if you don't encourage
people to use them. There is enough churn in the tree that there are
already a large number of changes to skip over, so skipping over
reformatting (even whitespace-only) seems like a small burden to me.

If this is really a problem, maybe we can encourage a particular
commenting convention in the Changelog, or something, so that people
know a change should be syntactically or even semantically neutral.

Of course, if I had my way there'd be a reformatting script run on
every checkin to force compliance, and a batch process run across the
tree to bring everything else in as well. Of course, since we use the
syntactic abomination that is C++ ( :) ) this is easier said than
done.

-- Dirk