Re: Please stop making extra unnecessary work for us all.

[Campbell Barton <ideasman42@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Oct 12, 2021 at 11:41 PM Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> wrote:
>
> Hello, Emacs and Stefan K.
>
> I'm referring to
>
> commit 0a7bab689c4a113dd295c9db55d8e76a34d5f9e1
> Author: Stefan Kangas <stefan@marxist.se>
> Date:   Mon Sep 27 23:56:55 2021 +0200
>
>     ; Minor stylistic fixes found by checkdoc
>
> , and several other similar changes.  Yes, that was the entire commit
> message for an assemblage of patches many hundreds of lines long, not
> even mentioning the files changed, never mind the defuns.  Sadly, git
> has no features for amending inadequate commit messages.
>
> But the point of this post is that these changes are surely unnecessary
> with a miniscule benefit, much like pure whitespace changes.
>
> And like pure WS changes, they mess up git blame, they make searches in
> history more difficult.  In some instances they introduce solecisms in
> English usage.

You can use ".git-blame-ignore-revs" to exclude white-space only changes.

Although it's best to limit this "strictly" to whitespace only
commits, since including more general cleanups could obscure
functional changes.

There is still the down-side of causing patches not to apply cleanly
and other things you've mentioned.

> Many non-functional changes have been made in CC Mode.  That
> additionally means that patches from standalone CC Mode are even less
> likely to apply cleanly in the Emacs branches than they were already.
> That means extra unwanted tedious work for me.
>
> And what are these changes?  In at least two instances the case of a
> letter in warning messages following a colon was changed from lower to
> upper.  Or was it the other way around?  Come on, please, this is
> madness.  Who would even notice the case of a letter after a colon in a
> warning message, much less care about it?
>
> I protest at these changes.  As far as I can remember, there was no
> discussion on emacs-devel preceding them.  They are disruptive changes.
> Can we please not have any more such.
>
> Thanks.
>
> --
> Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
>


-- 
- Campbell