Jeff Law wrote:
Ultimately I think there are X issues here.
1. What to do in the immediate term with the repo. I've got no strong
opinions here.
I do understand most of the opinions, but I would rather prefer that we don't
revert the trailing whitespace patch.
I definitely can live with them, and they probably cleaned up a bit the code.
2. What to do longer term. I'd like to see us fix the whitespace
stuff then use hooks or a cron job to make sure they don't come back
again in the future.
Agreed. I believe that we might want to have some automated tools (at least in contrib, like we have gcc_update there
already) to help us (in particular newbies) about purely layout issue (including whitespaces).
3. What is a suitable consequence for this gaffe by HJ?
I hope nothing serious would happen to HJ. He definitely wanted to help the GCC community. And perhaps, if he did ask
permission (which he probably should have) to remove whitespaces, it would have triggered tons of useless discussions
(like it does now).
My wish would be that every C source file in GCC would be indent-ed by GNU indent with --gnu option. But since this has
not been done, I suppose it is (sadly) not realistic. I don't understand all the issues involved (but I do admit that
many of my small patches have been kindly corrected, in particular by Diego Novillo, for "typographical layout" issues
[lack of space, ...].
Perhaps in a few years we would have more automated tools to help coding inside GCC. I could even dream of specialized
plugins for that (for the common case when building the compiler under Linux at least).
Regards.
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