Re: gratuitous changes

[Robert Anderson <rwa@alumni.princeton.edu>]

On Tue, 2003-02-04 at 08:44, Juanma Barranquero wrote:
> On 04 Feb 2003 08:09:46 -0800, Robert Anderson <rwa@alumni.princeton.edu> wrote:
> 
> > Hmm.  Didn't you just multiply by N times the problem Stefan was worried
> > about?
> 
> Perhaps my ability to read English prose is failing me again; I thought
> I was doing just what Richard asked for...

You did, but perhaps it would have been polite to confer with Stefan
first, to have the best timing on it.

> > Maybe if you provided the method that you used to get rid of the
> > whitespace, people with checked out files can apply the script to their
> > sandboxes to minimize the headaches this will cause when they try to
> > update.
> 
> Script?
> 
> Basically, I edited every single file and did
> 
>  M-x delete-trailing-whitespace [ret]
>  C-x C-s [ret]
>  C-x k [ret]
> 
> with the caveats that I only edited meaningful files, and I took into
> account the encoding (so I didn't end screwing files in
> iso-2022 or whatever).

IMO, that was not the optimal way to do it, both because it wasted your
time and it makes it harder for people to do a parallel change without
wasting their own.

If someone wanted to mirror those changes in a sandbox or branch to
prevent update or merge problems, they would probably have a hard time
figuring out what you mean by "meaningful files", and they certainly
don't want to press those keystrokes hundreds if not thousands of times.

Food for thought:  a script would have left a precise prescription for
what you did that was trivially applicable to other branches as well as
sandboxes to prevent the kinds of merge and update problems this was
trying to minimize.

Bob