On Sep 15, 2010, at 5:29 AM, Sean Owen wrote: > I noticed that some of my last changes to TestClusterDumper, for > example, were reversed in a subsequent change. I don't mind, they were > largely cosmetic, to fix little checkstyle warnings. Not sure if that > was on purpose or an accidental artifact of the merge. But I wonder if > people are finding it hard to merge such changes and if so are people > comfortable asking to keep 'hands off' certain sections for a limited > time when it's actively being worked on? (We should be able to do > this, informally, without resorting to locking or anything.)
This kind of stuff is generally why many projects either forgo cosmetic changes or make them automatic via SVN hooks or something similar. Large cosmetic changes often make it next to impossible to apply patches w/o a lot of work that were submitted previously, thus leaving you as the committer to then go pester the original contributor to update to trunk instead of you just being able to apply the fix. An alternative might be to apply all cosmetic changes at release time, after code freeze and just make reasonable efforts in the interim, but nothing sweeping.
