[Qemu-devel] Re: Patch removing spaces

[Jan Kiszka <jan.kiszka@siemens.com>]

Ian Jackson wrote:
> Balazs Attila-Mihaly \(Cd-MaN\) writes ("[Qemu-devel] Patch removing
>> spaces"): If anyone is interested: a patch which removes spaces from
>> the end of the lines. Compressed because it's rather big.
> 
> Please don't apply this patch!
> 
> Spaces at the ends of lines are indeed irritating and we should avoid
> them.  But going out of our way to remove them is definitely wrong -
> it's reformatting, which is nearly always wrong in Free Software.

Reformatting code according to some well established coding style is
surely _not_ wrong - for whatever kind of software. Tools are smart
enough to ignore plain whitespace changes. But even if rewrapping is
required, a clear commit comment will keep people away from searching
for functional changes (and that there are non can be checked beforehand
at binary level).

Reformatting sometimes also means re-reviewing (though I guess not in
this case) with the chance to discover yet hidden bugs. Happened quite a
few times for Linux during recent coding style fixes. Of course, bug
fixes were not merged with style fixes.

But such changes are indeed pointless if there is no decision to
strictly enforce the coding style from that point on. And if there is no
clearly documented style guide (e.g. in form of a indent script + a few
relaxation rules).

Jan

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