On Wed, 25 Nov 2009, Dave Korn wrote: > Kaveh R. GHAZI wrote: > > > I think we need to take a deep breath and relax. First of all, HJ didn't > > need approval for this patch. Whether it's useful or not, it aligns with > > our stated coding standards and it clearly qualifies as obvious under the > > "Free for all" category in our checkin policies. > > But does it, though? From http://gcc.gnu.org/svnwrite.html: > > > Free for all > > > > The following changes can be made by everyone with SVN write access: > > > > Fixes for obvious typos in ChangeLog files, docs, web pages, comments and > > similar stuff. Just check in the fix and copy it to gcc-patches. We don't > > want to get overly anal-retentive about checkin policies. > > > > Similarly, no outside approval is needed to revert a patch that you checked > > in. > > > > Importing files maintained outside the tree from their official versions. > > > > Creating and using a branch for development, including outside the parts of > > the compiler one maintains, provided that changes on the branch have > > copyright assignments on file. Merging such developments back to the > > mainline still needs approval in the usual way. > > > So, where are whitespace changes to non-comment parts of .c and .h source > files covered? I think that there may be a bit of a common assumption that > "obvious" extends somewhat further than the wording of the documentation > actually implies - not just in the context of this incident, but the question > has occurred to me in other cases too, and maybe now would be a good time to > clear it up.
The change certainly didn't fall under the obvious rule because of its size. One might argue that 'and similar stuff' covers coding-style changes, but here again I'd fear of a certain kind of people going wild and follow the coding-style by word rather than existing practice in GCC or even the code around their changes. So, I would say even obvious patches should be posted for review with the usual (but not documented) "will checkin tomorrow if there are no complaints" style disclaimer. Richard.
