[Bf-committers] Simple steps to get an harmonious collaboration

[Sybren A. Stüvel]

On Wed, 2 Jun 2021 at 07:56, Campbell Barton via Bf-committers <
bf-committers at blender.org> wrote:

> If the proposed policies are followed to the letter, we end up in
> situations where extra review iterations would be required for running
> clang-format, stripping what-space and spelling mistakes.
>

I don't really see a problem here. Somebody needs to do that work anyway.
This is typically done by the patch author if they have commit access, and
a reviewer otherwise. As someone with too many unread emails from
still-to-be-reviewed patches, I would prefer to not have to do these
cleanups myself when I land a patch. Often such formatting & whitespace
issues can be solved permanently by configuring the patch author's IDE to
do this for them, after which all subsequent patches will be fine in this
respect. To me that looks like a better solution than to accept
badly-formatted patches. I know I'm polarizing the situation here, but I
also feel that if one extra review iteration is so troublesome, we could
also look at the source of that trouble and see if we can improve things.
For example, is `arc diff` too hard to use, and should we maybe look at
some other tool to make reviewing easier? Or should we have an automatic
cleanup on patches, so that they adhere to the coding standard?


> When the issues are trivial though (trailing white-space) it adds some
> burden on the patch reviewer to have to remember that some patch which
> was otherwise fine - needs an extra iteration.
>

You don't have to remember when you write it in the review comments.

Sybren