[petsc-dev] Ongoing formatting changes

[Jed Brown]

On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 2:29 PM, Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 3:22 PM, Jed Brown <jedbrown at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
>
>> These changes are pretty obnoxious for contributors who have to
>> constantly rebase or merge (generating useless merge commits) amidst the
>> constant formatting changes. Since most of these are applications of
>> scripts, can we just enqueue them and apply them all at once when you
>> consider them complete?
>>
>
> By your own evaluation (~10%), these commits constitute a "fringe" element
> at best :) I don't think they are hard to rebase.
>

It depends what your code touches, but even when it touches something
"close" to your code, the missing context can prevent an auto-merge. You're
going to have a hell of a time merging plex.c work when Karl applies the
"for (" rule.

The utility of fully-specified formatting is more than just uniform
appearance, it's so that the code can be completely stable except where
useful changes are being made, which makes diffs and merging more
effective. Constant global tweaks are no better than locally reformatting
each time we touch a file. It's now very difficult to merge changes from
3.3 to petsc-dev. That's okay because we're due for a release anyway, but I
hope the formatting can be stable after 3.4 is released.
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