i know we have discussed this in the past, but we never really came to a consensus or policy, so i'd like to reopen the discussion on cleanup and subjective patches.
currently there are 7 jiras for cleanup issues, 6 of them marked as major. the problem with cleanup or subjective patches is that they take committer time, they can collide with other patches (or patches in progress), and they can introduce new bugs. i know we have discussed this in the past, but i think it would be good to establish a policy of rejecting such patches. this isn't to say that the code looks nice or is clean as it is, it's just that we want to avoid disrupting a code base that people count on. that is my perspective. it would be good to come to an agreement on a policy so that we can deal with such patches quickly rather than drag things out for both the contributor and the committer. right now, we have a patch that fixes a memory leak and a patch that switches integer constants to enum and they are both marked as major. another minor patch fixes how the log cleanups are done. i think we should be focusing on the leaks and logs. perhaps in the future when we don't have such a backlog of changes, we can reevaluate the policy, but right now i would like to make "code cleanup not a bug fix or enhancement" a reason for patch rejection. other thoughts? thanx ben
