[Zope3-dev] Should major for-reaching changes be made for purposes of style?

[Jim Fulton]

A change in style, if applied everywhere can lead to massive
code changes.  This can have serious downsides.  If people
are working on branches, where most new work should be done,
then  merging is made more difficult.  People who read the checkins
have a lot of extra code to review for a small benefit.
(I don't read the checkins regularly myself and really *really*
*REALLY* appreciate the efforts of folks that do and don't
want to make their job harder.)

OTOH, consistent style is beneficial. :)

I'm interested in hearing what people think about this in general.
Should we make far reaching code changes to enforce a consistent
style?  Or should we update style when making other changes?
I tend to do the later.  I think that the developers of Python
prefer that changes like this be made more gradually. They've
been burned by mass changes in the past.

Thoughts?

Jim


Martijn Pieters wrote:
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> 
> Now that our dear BDFL has expressed the opinion that exceptions raising
> of the form:
> 
>   raise FooException, "Bar"
> 
> is definitely passé and so 20th century[1], and now that the holy writ of
> PEP 8[2] has been updated to reflect the current view that all exception
> raising incantations should be expressed as:
> 
>   raise FooException("Bar")
> 
> would people object if I convert such expressions in violation of this
> view to the One True Way? (At least in src/zope as much such mistakes in
> other code may be blamed on infidels more easily).


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