Trailing white space and other pedantry.

[Ken Thomases]

On May 16, 2011, at 7:42 PM, max wrote:

> On 05/16/2011 01:00 PM, André Hentschel wrote:
>> Am 16.05.2011 18:34, schrieb max at mtew.isa-geek.net:
>>> From: Max TenEyck Woodbury<max at mtew.isa-geek.net>
>>> 
>>> I have been working on the documentation extraction problem and code
>>> analysis problem.
>>> 
>>> I have made some progress with the program I am writing to do this.  It
>>> reads the same files as c2man.pl does, but does a more detailed parse
>>> of the code.  In fact, it even reads and processes all the include
>>> files.  It is far from complete at this time, but it does produce
>>> interesting warnings.
>>> 
>>> One of the warnings reports lines with trailing while space.  It has
>>> turned up quite a few places where this occurs.  If I understand the
>>> preferred style, there should not be trailing white space.  The
>>> question I have is what should I do with them.  I can either fix the
>>> files or turn that particular warning off.  So far, I have been fixing
>>> the files on a local copy of the repository.
>>> 
>>> Should I turn the fixes into patches and submit them, or just keep them
>>> to myself?
>>> 
>> No, white space only changes will not be accepted.
>> Your are right about the preferred style, but most likely the regarding code is a bit old.
>> new code should never have trailing white space.
>> The best reason is "git blame" to see who wrote the code, i think that makes it clear.
> 
> I understand that white space only patches will not be applied.  Will
> they be applied if they accompany other corrections?

If one would otherwise have modified a line in the course of doing development, then one can and should fix an issue like trailing whitespace on that line.  If the line would not have been changed except for the whitespace issue, then it shouldn't be changed.

> Also, please address the other questions.

Well, he might not have known the answer to or had an opinion about the other questions.

> Should I submit patches against simple errors in macro definition
> formatting? There are some places where my program catches mismatches
> that SOME other compilers might ignore.
> 
> There are also some places in the wine headers where macros are
> redefined differently from the headers provided by the system or
> compilers I have installed. There are also cases where the macros are
> defined differently by different wine headers.  Because these problems
> may depend on my system configuration, I believe it might not be
> possible to simply patch these definitions match the configuration I
> have. The problems CAN be fixed simply by adding #undef before each
> redefinition, but I think a review of these changes might be in order.
> They seem to occur in batches, with none in most headers and multiple
> messes in others.

Am I understanding correctly that these are whitespace difference again?  Maybe you could provide an example of what you mean.

To my knowledge the mismatches you have identified have never actually caused problems.  Until they do, I expect that fixes for them won't be accepted.  Also, when they do, that will probably help guide which of your proposed solutions is preferred.

> Should I submit each correction as a separate patch, separate patches
> accompanying separate bug reports, combined patches for a given header
> or combined patch and bug report?

Hard to say without an illustration of what you're talking about.

Regards,
Ken