Re: [platform-ui-dev] Formatting

[Douglas Pollock <douglas.pollock@xxxxxxxx>]

On October 13, 2004 12:44 pm, Stefan Xenos wrote:
> The formatting is causing the following problems:

While formatting does causes problems, there are usually ways around them.


> 1. It is hard to get patches working between branches.

There is the trick of formatting both the maintenance and development stream.  
This means that the only diff between the branches will be functional, not 
cosmetic.


> 2. The CVS annotation view has become useless -- it always shows the last
> person to format the file, not the last person to actually change some
> line.

This also applies to files that are moved or to other forms of refactoring.  
The best way to track this down is a binary search of the CVS revision 
history -- looking for when a particular change occurred.  

In the case of moved files, this is slightly harder.  You can still do it by 
looking for changes that occured at the same time as a file 
deletion/addition.

To track changes across a move combined with a functional change, you're 
probably forced to use diff from the command-line.


> 3. It is hard to track what was actually changed in a particular checkin,
> since the formatter causes changes throughout the file.

This is unfortunate.  People should try to only commit format changes to CVS 
separately from a functional change, if they should do it all....


> 4. It is very hard to compare revisions.

See #1 and #2.



cheers,
d.