Re: WTF?

[Michael Matz <matz at suse dot de>]

Hi,

On Wed, 25 Nov 2009, Richard Kenner wrote:

> > In my mind it's very simple: trailing whitespace poses exactly _no_ 
> > problem (except of being against the coding standard), 
> 
> It's against the coding standards for a very good reason, which is that it
> makes patching harder because you have lines that compare differently but
> look identical.

Wow I like this creative twisting of arguments.  So in order to not make 
patching harder in theory you make patching harder in practice?!
Brilliant.

> So removing them, while making some patches harder to
> apply, makes others easier into the future.

Except if you produce patches by hand this change doesn't make the 
slightest thing easier in the future.  patch and diff will consume and 
generate applyable .diff files no matter if the material did or didn't 
contain trailing white space as long as this isn't changed between 
producing and applying the patch, hence future patch processing is not 
affected in any way.

I also didn't want to know how to make patch work around this commit by 
loosening it's apply algorithm, neither did I want to know how to mold 
the patches I have into a form that now applies again.  The point is That 
I Don't Want To Work Around useless unapproved mass changes.

I'm also surprised by the hair splitting and bike shedding if the patch 
was or wasn't obvious.  To any reasonable person it must be clear that due 
to the ripple effect it has it is not obvious and hence has to be reverted 
already just out of policy reasons.  Then we perhaps can discuss further 
about the merits of the change, and then, after reaching agreement, commit 
it again; but only then.

I'll note that conveniently nobody of the supporters of this change 
answered Richards question about the positive effects of the change and 
the seeming absence of real GCC bugs so that we can waste our time on this 
type of thing.


Ciao,
Michael.