Re: [patch] Fix comment formatting in m68hc11/*.

["Joseph S. Myers" <jsm28 at cam dot ac dot uk>]

On Fri, 2 Nov 2001, Neil Booth wrote:

> It might be more productive if you write a script that rejects
> check-ins if the common formatting rules are broken.  It should be
> possible to catch the common ones with a few greps (the way I believe
> you catch most of them anyway).

I don't like the idea of any scripts rejecting checkins that can't be
proved to have no false positives.  One might require that people check in
under the "gcc" directory name, no longer the "egcs" link, that way, but I
doubt comment formatting checks that way would work reliably.  I know that
my spell checking script (based on that in Debian lintian) does have some
false positives.

> That way the number and invasiveness of these formatting patches will
> be reduced.  I am not very keen on this endless cycle of formatting
> patches because it tends to devalue all locally-retained diffs, and
> often render them useless.

Where code and comments fail to follow the GNU Coding Standards, we should
fix them.  Once things are fixed we should try to inform anyone posting a
badly formatted patch about its problems, and hopefully make more frequent
fixes for those problems that still creep in.  I think separate small
formatting patches are better than doing a single massive patch to fix
every formatting problem throughout GCC.  (I think GDB did something like
the latter, using GNU indent on all source files, but I wouldn't really
trust indent to fix formatting properly.)

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
jsm28@cam.ac.uk