[webkit-dev] Reformatting-only patches being applied to trunk

[Nikolas Zimmermann]

Am 25.07.2009 um 10:08 schrieb Oliver Hunt:

> I've just noticed that there have been a few purely style related  
> patches being landed in the tree recently, I don't believe these are  
> a good idea and that any further reformatting only patches be  
> rejected.
Hm, I don't share your opinion here. In the past we've always tried to  
decouple style & functionality changes. So if I was adding a new  
feature X in class Y, any style cleanups in class Y should be landed  
in a seperated commit.

> Historically we have avoided purely style related changes as they  
> impact our ability to track code changes efficiently and make patch  
> merging more complex. The general approach to code cleanup is to  
> clean up regions of code as we work in them -- this means that more- 
> or-less the only code effected by reformatting is code that was  
> being modified anyway.
I agree that merging is harder. Though if we'd disallow pure style  
commits in the future (in areas that you don't plan to work on  
directly) this would only delay problems (like merging difficulties).

Have a nice day,
Niko