* On 02 Sep 2016, Vincent Lefevre wrote: 
> On 2016-09-02 10:22:12 -0400, Damien Riegel wrote:
> > On Wed, Aug 31, 2016 at 03:14:34PM -0700, David Champion wrote:
> > > I suggest that we decide upon a style and a target release (1.8? 1.9?)
> > 
> > It's not clear to me who "we" is in this context: people with push
> > access, community, or something else? Anyway style is mostly a matter of
> > taste and in the end we can all adapt to whatever style is chosen. (But
> > please, get rid of the space before parenthesis for functions :).

Committers with input from active developers, I would say.


> > > where that style will be applied to the whole code base.  Apply the
> > > style from up top, using rules that are in the repo and no manual
> > > tweaks, between code freeze and release.  We can put it in a commit hook
> > > and document installing that hook in the developer notes.
> > 
> > There are two main drawbacks here:
> >  - Applying new style to the whole code base makes "blame" less useful,
> >    because most lines would be changed to a generic restyling commit.
> 
> Unless the -w option (to ignore white space) is used?
> I have not tried, though.

Neither have I but it's worth a look - we can test this in shared/public
clone before doing anything to mutt-dev.


> >  - I think it will create unnecessary conflicts for people using patches
> >    on top of vanilla mutt.
> 
> One can still apply the patch ignoring whitespace (-l), clean up
> (reindent, etc.), and rebuild the patch. A bit annoying but this
> would have to be done only once.

This is annoying, and losing annotations/blame is annoying too, but there
also are consequences of not doing it:

- harder to enforce style in future commits
- more future commits will include style only changes in code
  neighboring substantive changes, making patches harder to review

It's difficult and, I think, far less useful to apply new style to only
individual lines of code, leaving enclosing blocks alone.  And I'm not
very comfortable with holding contributors strictly to a coding style
when we can't give them tools (indent, etc; hooks) for adhering to that
style.

-- 
David Champion • [email protected]

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