[Python-Dev] Introducing the ``make check`` command

[Brett Cannon]

After having one too many commits be rejected by having trailing
whitespace, I wrote a script that runs reindent.py over all .py files
that are to be checked in. But since there are other things that one
should be aware of when creating a patch I let people know if they
edited anything in the Doc directory, Misc/ACKS, and Misc/NEWS.

There are a couple of things I would like to see the command gain. One
is to detect if any files (outside of Doc) have changed since the last
run of regrtest. That would require writing out a file, though, so one
can at least stat the file to get the modification time. Do people
have any issues with the idea?

I would also like to more or less codify whether a patch means someone
needs to be added to Misc/ACKS or not. I should be able to run ``svn
diff`` to get the output and see if enough lines have changed. Could
then write it out to a common file so that one does not need to run
the command again if the patch is needed.

Lastly, I would like to have it strip trailing whitespace in C files.
The only problem is that I don't know if removing trailing whitespace
could possibly cause a problem or not. Anyone know?

-Brett