launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Jeroen Vermeulen <jtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2011-06-14 11:13, Robert Collins wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 8:51 PM, Julian Edwards
> <julian.edwards@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>  wrote:
> Can you expand on the value you get? What does it do for you / us to
> be told about whitespace and indentation variation?
If I may just butt in here, are we all talking about the same thing?

There's "ensuring consistent whitespace" (which I find immensely useful 
and I hope is not under discussion) and there's "being told about 
inconsistent whitespace" (which we may be better off without).
The potential harm in auto-formatting is proportional to the risk of the 
mistakes it fixes.  If indentation is suspicious, it's probably best to 
call a human.  But at the other extreme, sometimes whitespace warnings 
have been about sorely-needed comments being incomplete.  (Ideally 
missing capitalization or punctuation would tell you about this as well, 
but that advantage is lost when writing gets too sloppy).
One possible compromise would be to review a diff of each 
auto-formatting.  One thing we keep hearing after all is that it's 
helpful to recognize familiar code visually.  If we develop an eye for 
reformatting problems, we may retain the same accuracy but with less 
distraction.

Jeroen