Change #262261

Comments

doc/developer: allow whitespace changes mixed with functional changes
The cosmetic-changes policy in developer.texi was written during the SVN
era, when reviewing indentation changes mixed with functional changes
was genuinely difficult.

Since FFmpeg has moved to Git, reviewers now have simple built-in tools
to ignore whitespace changes:

  git diff -w
  git log -p --ignore-all-space

Forgejo's pull request UI also offers a 'Hide whitespace changes'
toggle, making it trivial to focus on the functional diff.

For those who prefer reviewing patches in their mail client, the same
result can be achieved by saving the patch and running:

  git apply --ignore-whitespace <patch> && git diff -w

Relax the policy so that indentation changes which are invisible to
git diff --ignore-all-space may accompany functional changes, while
still requiring non-whitespace cosmetic changes to be in separate
commits.

Signed-off-by: Zhao Zhili <zhilizhao@tencent.com>

Changed files

• doc/developer.texi