[Development] White space / coding style patches welcome?

[Oswald Buddenhagen]

On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 04:35:59AM +0100, Axel Waggershauser wrote:
> So to fix whitespace (according to
> http://qt-project.org/wiki/Qt_Coding_Style) one has to come up with
> whitespace-only patches. I have a couple of questions regarding those:
> 
> 1. Is something like the above patch welcome at all?
>
the recent consensus seems to be: yes.

> 2. Who would be interested/responsible for reviewing such boring patches?
>
me, when i'm bored.

> 3. How to best split up patches from that category? e.g. fixing all
> "if(...){" -> "if (...) {" occurrences in qtbase would be a rather
> large patch (I have it half done)
>   a) split that up based on "manageable" subdirectories?
>
yes, and that only for easy recovery from merge conflicts (which you
will get quite some of in highly active areas). other than that, make it
one huge whitespace cleanup change: remove trailing whitespace, expand
tabs (which for fun have inconsistent expectations regarding their
size), fix indentation, fix mixplaced line breaks (the brace re-wrapping
falls into this category), add missing spaces, etc.

somebody attempted this just a few days ago, but gave up when the scope
of the undertaking became clear. i can't find the change now ...

>   b) only do it in files where it is used inconsistently / where the
> wrong occurrences are the minority?
>
no, do it consistently - to have a good example everywhere, and no
excuses for messing up. then we can make the automatic checking
stricter, too (which lars said was a precondition for even bothering
with a cleanup to start with).

> 4. Given that such whitespace-only patches don't change the semantic
> of the code, is pushing to stable the correct approach? (I read that
> one is supposed to pick the 'most stable branch that is still
> applicable' because 'up-merging' is easy but backporting is evil.)
> 
do it for dev. it's going to be merged into stable RSN anyway. if you
don't make the deadline, you can still re-target for stable (it would be
stupid not to do that, as then forward-merging would become hell).

have fun ^^