Re: trivial trailing whitespace issue

[Basile STARYNKEVITCH <basile at starynkevitch dot net>]

Joseph S. Myers wrote:
> On Wed, 25 Nov 2009, Basile STARYNKEVITCH wrote:
>
> > My wish would be that every C source file in GCC would be indent-ed by GNU
> > indent with --gnu option. But since this has not been done, I suppose it is
> > (sadly) not realistic. I don't understand all the issues involved (but I do
>
> There are various deviations of GCC style from what GNU indent does.  If 
> you want to make this a reality, I advise enhancing GNU indent to add 
> options to make it follow the style used in GCC as closely as possible,

I would imagine that patching GNU indent (in its source code form) requires a copyright assignment specific to it (and 
uncovered by a, or at least "mine", GCC copyright assigment to FSF). If this is the case, I [Basile] won't do it 
(because getting a copyright assignemnt is so painful to me).

Perhaps a simpler alternative would be to revise the GCC coding standards so that they be compatible with GNU ident 
behavior. I have no idea of how to push that idea. I even don't understand the procedure for changing them, and who 
decides such change. And I don't understand how painful would it be to require all GCC C source to be GNU indent-ed. I 
would imagine that smarter people have already discussed & rejected that trivial idea.

But it is a pity that in nearly 2010, whitespace issues are still manually handled, and trigger such big discussions. In 
our time, computers should be good enough to handle whitespace :-) better than humans manually do.

Regards.
--
Basile STARYNKEVITCH         http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/
email: basile<at>starynkevitch<dot>net mobile: +33 6 8501 2359
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