Re: [dpdk-dev] [PATCH] all: refactor coding style

[Tiwei Bie <tiwei.bie@intel.com>]

On Thu, Jul 20, 2017 at 11:32:18AM +0300, Thomas Monjalon wrote:
> 20/07/2017 10:56, Jens Freimann:
> > On Wed, Jul 19, 2017 at 06:23:21PM +0800, Tiwei Bie wrote:
> > >On Wed, Jul 19, 2017 at 05:24:38PM +0800, Van Haaren, Harry wrote:
> > [...]
> > > > Hi Tiwei,
> > > >
> > > > Although the idea and motivation for code-cleanup are good, performing
> > > > large cleanup across a code-base is not a good solution. The reason that
> > > > these types of cleanups (or even re-formatting the entire codebase) are not
> > > > performed often is that it "invalidates" any currently-in-progress patch-sets.
> > > > As a result, more work is required from many contributors to rebase useful
> > > > features due to across-the-board white-space cleanups.
> > > >
> > > > Just expressing concern that we need to think carefully about the impacts
> > > > of such a patch.
> > > >
> > >
> > > Yeah, I agree. Such patch may cause many conflicts. But this patch
> > > is almost generated automatically, that is to say, it's a quick work.
> > > And it's more like some fixes (for the bad coding style) rather than
> > > silly re-formatting done by `indent'. So I just want to share it with
> > > the community, and see the potential feedbacks. Thank you for your
> > > comments! :)
> > 
> > what I'm more concerned about with these kind of huge clean-ups is
> > that it makes git-blame less useful for me. Next time I want to look
> > up who changed this line I'll just find your cleanup patch. Then I have
> > to do another step to find out which commit introduced the change I'm
> > looking for. 
> > 
> > I'm more for cleaning up these things next time you do a semantic
> > change in this code.
> 
> +1 for doing clean-up when refactoring code

Hi Jens and Thomas,

I agree with your concerns.

But if you look into this patch, you will find that it's not a
huge cleanup. Actually in this patch, although the file list is
long, there are only 69 lines are changed (across the whole DPDK
source code), and only 1 new line is added. The changes in each
file are very minimal. I don't think it will destroy the useful
info you need in git-blame.

I definitely agree that it would be perfect to clean-up the code
when you need to do a semantic change in this code. But you will
also find that it's very possible that you won't need to do a
semantic change to these code for a very long time. And much of
the changed code in this patch is old code. I think the new code
for DPDK has much better quality than before. It's really annoying
(at least to me) each time come across those bad code. :-(

Thank you for sharing your thoughts! :-)

Best regards,
Tiwei Bie