[sldev] [IDEA][META] hg branch for trivial changes

[Soft]

On Fri, May 1, 2009 at 8:26 AM, Boroondas Gupte
<sllists at boroon.dasgupta.ch> wrote:
> Hi all
>
> I plan to clone http://bitbucket.org/lindenlab/http-texture/ to have a place
> to collect trivial changes to the viewer code base, such as fixing typos or
> indentation. Before I do so, I'd like to hear your opinion about it.
>
> Past and current situation
>
> If I remember correctly, Linden Lab once discouraged us from sending them
> indentation-only patches, because the overhead to review and import them was
> too much in relation to the benefit of such changes. Instead we should clean
> up code while working on the specific parts for bigger bugs of features.
> This is quite some while ago, so I don't know if that's still the current
> recommendation.

The problem with indentation patches isn't review, it's merging.

If 200 lines in one file are indented, they all show up as changed.
What happens when that's merged with a branch without the indentation
change, but where one line in that soup of 200 was changed? It's very
likely that the change with a code effect will get lost without a
very, very careful eye. It's also going to slow down the merge, which
extends our critical path.

LL's own future move to mercurial or better merge tools may change
that. The remaining question would then be review time. Right now, a
bunch of formatting changes wouldn't make it back to the tree, though.