Re: Please stop making extra unnecessary work for us all.

[Stefan Kangas]

Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> writes:

> Many non-functional changes have been made in CC Mode.  That
> additionally means that patches from standalone CC Mode are even less
> likely to apply cleanly in the Emacs branches than they were already.
> That means extra unwanted tedious work for me.
>
> And what are these changes?  In at least two instances the case of a
> letter in warning messages following a colon was changed from lower to
> upper.  Or was it the other way around?  Come on, please, this is
> madness.  Who would even notice the case of a letter after a colon in a
> warning message, much less care about it?

I do apologize if these changes lead to a large amount of extra work for
you.  I'm not familiar with how CC-mode is developed, so I had assumed
that you would merge the Emacs tree into yours or the other way around,
which seems to be the most common solution to merge conflicts.  I will
think twice before making any changes to cc-mode in the future.

The background is this:

I was running checkdoc in an automated way on the entire Emacs codebase.
This allowed me to fix many real issues in our documentation and clear
violations of our style.  Every time there was an issue, if I could fix
it, I did, as it slowed this process down -- for me, and anyone that
might do this later.  (Checkdoc stops on every single one for review.)
Some of them I couldn't fix, so I left them alone.

If someone wants to, they can now run checkdoc on all our Lisp code in
an automated way and relatively quickly find any newly introduced
issues, for example shortly before releasing a new version.  My hope is
that this will lead to more consistency in our documentation and
messages.  I expect that you value such things as much as I do.

Parts of your message unfortunately seems to be suggesting that these
changes were insignificant and/or useless taken as a whole.  I think
that such a view is mistaken, and misses the point.  For example, one
outcome of this work was improvements to checkdoc.el, another was an
improvement to our coding conventions.  These things would not have
happened without first running checkdoc.el on our code.

Your claim that some of the changes were minor is true.  I cannot agree
that they were therefore not worth doing; if you take such a line of
reasoning too far, we should also not run spell checkers, as typos don't
matter.  Most of the changes under discussion are clear mistakes that
should have been fixed.

But I concede that some changes might have slipped through that were not
very important to make.  I'm only human, I do my best.  I hope that you
can accept my limitations and mistakes in this regard.  Meanwhile, I'm
willing to accept that the best analogy you could find here is
"whitespace changes".