On Jan 21, 2005, at 12:22 PM, Daniel John Debrunner wrote:
B) Re-formatting. Changes in this group are a nightmare. :-(
Because everyone has a different idea of what the correct formatting is.
It also tends to make life difficult for someone who is modifying the
file as any format cleanup will tend to cause merge failures.
I'm loathe to even raise this because of the endless discussions that
can ensue.
I have had good experience with creating an ant task which reformats whole codebase and dictating that it be run before checkins.
This has a few benefits:
* Anyone can use their auto-reformat to format however they like when they work, and still bring it back to standard on checkin.
* Formatting changes are left out of diffs/updates even when it is otherwise unchanged but near changed code
* Ends the fight once and for all =)
Using SVN it is even nicer as it uses hashes to determine file changes instead of timestamps (this is painful under CVS as it uses timestamps, so it always looks like everything has changed).
-Brian
