[Mulgara-dev] committing guidelines

[Paul Gearon]

On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 1:39 AM, Life is hard, and then you die <
ronald at innovation.ch> wrote:

>
> May I suggest something regarding how many changes to commit together?
> I was just looking through r718 (sorry Paul, nothing personal, just a
> very obvious example that pushed my button) trying to figure out what
> exactly the change was, and it was a right royal pain because about
> 90% of the changes were whitespace/comments/general-formatting fixes
> and only about 10% were related to the actual thing being fixed.
>
> I understand very well that when you're in a file fixing stuff that
> you want to also fix all the formatting things, but I would like to
> suggest that those two things please be pulled apart and committed
> separately. Yes, it's a pain to go in an undo various stuff and commit
> in multiple parts, but if we want others to be able to review the
> changes then this is essential. IMNSHO, if things like formatting
> fixes make up more than 10% of the changes then they should be
> committed separately. I even go so far as to say that, e.g., if you
> have two not directly related sets of changes a files and one set also
> affects another file, then again split them up into two separate
> commits.
>
> Anyway, that's my suggestion. Flames away...
>

Yes, this makes sense.  If I were reviewing it, then sure, I'd probably have
posted the same suggestion.

My perspective is that the formatting must be changed (it regularly violates
the coding standards we've had from the outset - sometimes in confusing
ways). Even if it didn't have to be changed, I'd often want to do it anyway,
as I'm often finding code that I wrote that *someone* (yes, I know who)
reformatted incorrectly.  If I put off reformatting until my changes are
done, then it won't happen. I can't reformat before I've made the changes,
as I often don't know that I'm about to change a class until I need to (due
to editing another class). It makes a lot of sense from my end to do it all
in one go.

I'll *try* to make it easier for you by splitting it up.  I won't make any
promises though (unless I get shouted down).  :-)


Paul
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