Re: Mixing whitespace and topical changes

[Katsumi Yamaoka <yamaoka@jpl.org>]

>>>>> In <muxr6qk31dc.fsf@uzeb.lrde.epita.fr> Didier Verna wrote:
> Reiner Steib <reinersteib+gmane@imap.cc> wrote:

>> please avoid committing lots of whitespace changes mixed with topical
>> changes.

>                 Reiner,

>         I can understand your concern (I guess it mainly has to do with
> synchronizing between the GNU Emacs version and the CVS version), but
> I'm not ready to change my setup (all whitespace cleanup is done
> automatically and I never see them in diffs) until this issue has been
> officially resolved. I've tried to raise it several times in the past
> but didn't get any interest from anybody. Note that I will accept
> whatever decision the majority adopts, even if it goes against me :-)

I did the same before, but now I keep clean only things that I
changed.  It is enough for me that Lars ever said to me "Don't
use whitespace.el or equivalent when changing Gnus.".  IIRC, he
said he agrees to make source code clean all together but it
should be done independently to topical changes.  So, I don't
mix whitespace changes and topical changes as much as possible.
Or else, not only the maintainers who check the validity of
changes but also people who read CVS diffs will be bothered if
there are such changes.  (Actually I was sometimes annoyed when
I had been merging Gnus' changes into Semi-gnus in the past.)

Making source code clean is generally good.  But I think it
should be done line by line manually at least in Gnus.  What do
you think about this?

(insert "One space character is here> 
	")

It is a bad habit of course, though.

> Let me restate my position: I believe that the right thing to do is to
> have whitespace-cleanup on write-file-hooks for everybody committing to
> Gnus. This is simple to achieve, this effectively removes any such
> problems and this makes the files [automatically] cleaner. There's also
> the question of the info files on which I only got a "I've heard that it
> is better this way" sort of message.[1]

> Sorry to be a little pushy on this, but whitespace.el functions on a
> major-mode basis and not on a file-name basis, so I would need some
> trickery to make it stop working on Gnus files, so I really want a
> discussion about this before.

> Footnotes:
> [1]  FWIW, texinfo-mode is on whitespace-modes by default, and I'd never
> heard any complaint about this until a few days ago.

Let me write repeatedly; please don't use tabs in texi files.
Especially for sections in which the indentation is meaningful,
like @lisp ... @end lisp.

Regards,