[webkit-dev] Whitespace changes

[Mark Rowe]

On 2009-08-27, at 12:57, Dirk Pranke wrote:

> 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.

There's a difference between enforcing our coding style on new code,  
and retroactively applying our new style to the hundreds of thousands  
of lines of code that already exist.  Your comment conflates these two  
issues.   No-one is going to disagree that we should enforce the  
coding style on new code.  That would be stupid.  However it is clear  
that applying our current coding style to existing code is a much less  
clear-cut issue.  We wouldn't be having this discussion if it were as  
obvious as your comment suggests.

There's also a huge difference between enforcing WebKit coding style  
and enforcing some other coding style.  Trailing whitespace is not  
mentioned in the WebKit coding style guidelines.

- Mark

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