Whitespace and bullying

[Martin Schwenke]

On Sat, 07 Apr 2018 20:18:29 +1200, Andrew Bartlett
<abartlet at samba.org> wrote:

> On Sat, 2018-04-07 at 16:44 +1000, Martin Schwenke wrote:

> > One problem is that if a subsystem has a lot of failures (perhaps even
> > just trailing whitespace in comments?), then the flag will be off for a
> > long time (forever?) and we won't catch new problems.  

> We need to practice what we preach.  Many contributors (myself if you
> need a specific example) pattern far better by example of the code
> nearby than rule-books. 

> If the majority of our code doesn't comply with README.Coding then the
> rule shouldn't be in README.Coding.  

While I agree, I'm working hard to accomplish some particular goals.
Those goals don't include getting sidetracked by having to fix
coding standard violations in comments in code that I'm hoping to
remove.  I already feel over-committed and under pressure.

I use editor and git support to be able to spot the easy things like
whitespace issues.  I'm not saying all of my new code complies with all
of README.Coding but since I started using the available tool support
those particular problems are (almost?) gone in my patches.  This is a
simple method that actually works.

Why don't we see if we can solve these problems by recommending that
people use widely available tools?  This seems like a better initial
solution than adding complexity that will (not "might", please talk to
my friend Murphy!) block valid code from getting into the tree.

peace & happiness,
martin