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

[Dominik Huber]

Jim Fulton wrote:

> 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? 

Consistent style is very important and IMO it's great that some 
code-cleaner look after 'none-stylish' code.
It might just a problem of timing that code-refactorer and code-cleaner 
don't hurts each other.
Perhaps we just have to separate cleaning and merging periods more 
explicitly.

Regards,
Dominik