On Fri, Jan 6, 2012 at 1:10 PM, Rick Winscot <rick.wins...@gmail.com> wrote: > If, by chance, developers need to diff between rev50 and rev200... all they > have to do is take rev50 and format it which should give them an > approximation of rev101. If there is any question - they can always do a > three-way compare of rev50 (re-formatted), rev101, and rev200. Having one > person do the re-formatting after the repository is in place... and > committing the re-formatting changes in _1_ commit is the key.
It won't be by chance, at least not at first. It will most definitely be necessary on occasion until we get far enough away from the pre-formatted code to not need to compare anymore - if ever. In practice though, I've done this on several occasions and I've never had a serious problem with it. Sure, it's produced diffs that have contained a lot of "garbage" changes, but I've never had a huge issue with wandering through them to find what I needed. If we really are too timid about making these kinds of changes then we'll likely be too timid to do other refactorings as well. If code formatting is the right thing to do then we should just bite the bullet and do it I think. Greg
