[Dune-devel] whitespace hook and files maintaned by upstream projects

[Markus Blatt]

Hi,

we are currently approaching an IMHO rather unsettling maintainance
problems. For CMake as well as for autotools we are using scripts that
are maintained be other projects (e.g. autoconf-archive). Naturally,
these maintainers are using other programming guidelines than DUNE and
could not care less about them too. In DUNE we are enforcing rather
strict guidelines (-> no tabs at all!). In former times it was at
least possible to deactivate them using some magic in the commit
messages. The last time I tried this with pdelab, it did not work any
more. My, admittedly rather furious, email with the problematic
patches
http://lists.dune-project.org/pipermail/dune-pdelab/2014-April/000664.html
to the list did not cause any action/comments by the
originators of the whitespace-hook. 

This is very unfortunate and in the meantime even other patches for
the same bug (in pdelab) have been submitted and made the files
diverge even more from the upstream versions:
1a12092a04ea3057bda6b0cc9b645b1436fd13c5, and
9778e4373a8da45fbbf7cd62b57c374db68a0896 (with suboptimal commit
messages). In the current situation any patches from
upstream have to be changed to remove all tabs/trailing
whitespaces (and now even more!). Reviewing theses commits in DUNE is
therefore rather hard, in addition providing patches made within DUNE
to upstream maintainers is even harder. 

I would really appreciate it, if we could somehow resolve these problems
as this is currently a maintainance nightmare and really does cost
time. With few people maintaining the buildsystem it does not get any
better.

I would propose the following:
1. Either reactivate the possibility to deactivate the whitespace-hook
  on demand. 
2. We make a list of the files that are maintained upstream and the
whitespace-hook automatically ignores whitespace changes in these
files.

Personally I would prefer 2 with the list of files being present in
repository of the DUNE module.

Markus

-- 
Do you need more support with DUNE or HPC in general? 

Dr. Markus Blatt - HPC-Simulation-Software & Services http://www.dr-blatt.de
Hans-Bunte-Str. 8-10, 69123 Heidelberg, Germany
Tel.: +49 (0) 160 97590858
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