"Look at anyone who is extremely nimble with the kernel, and ask them what they worked on to get going with development. Did Andrew Morton fixup whitespace errors when he was starting to become familiar with the tree? Did I? No, none of us did this stuff. We read over the code and learned how it worked, did a port, optimized a lookup algorithm somewhere. Consistently we see people turding with whitespace, and not breaking out of that cycle. That is a problem."
Background activity
Fixing whitespace / coding style and refining comments is something I do as a background activity when my brain is mulling something else. For example, I might be figuring out how to implement some new feature, or fix some bug.
Point is, it's a filler activity once my brain's already started chewing on something else. It's not the starter activity. I'm with David Miller on this one.
--
Program Intellivision and play Space Patrol!
Chris Mason's post was much
Chris Mason's post was much more worthy of quoting ...
"For lots of people, we're going to be that experiment from college they never quite want to admit to later on in life."
Deep down you know it's true.
code dependency analysis
code dependency analysis
As Foghorn Leghorn would say ...
"Two nothings is nothing!"
White space is mostly ignored by the compiler and by programmers as well, except in the case when it screws up your formatting so badly that you can't read the code.
Why are people wasting time with nothing - if the spacing is annoying, change it when you actually make a meaningful change to the code in that area. I think Linus said as much a few years ago...
This whole shamozzle reminds me of my old workplace - if I had a pet student for a few weeks I gave them interesting things to work on and made sure they learned something useful. I used to scream at my workmates and call them morons because they're too feeble-minded to teach the students anything and instead have the students doing stupid menial tasks that teach them absolutely nothing (and probably leaves them with the impression that a research laboratory does nothing interesting).