[Python-Dev] pep 7

[Brian Curtin]

On Fri, Mar 20, 2015 at 10:02 PM, Neil Girdhar <mistersheik at gmail.com> wrote:
> The code reviews I got asked me to revert PEP 7 changes.  I can understand
> that, but then logically someone should go ahead and clean up the code.
> It's not "high risk" if you just check for whitespace equivalence of the
> source code and binary equivalence of the compiled code.  The value is for
> people who are new to the codebase.

There are a lot of areas of the C code that aren't explicitly or
directly tested, so yes, a lot of changes are high risk, especially in
bulk. While a one time change while checking binary equivalence would
do it, it's also a huge amount of churn just to follow a guideline.
Without an automated checker for the guidelines, if things get in they
just get in, and sometimes you can modify them while making
improvements to the code, but sometimes it depends on what exactly
you're doing as well. On top of this, we already disallow mass PEP 8
changes to avoid the churn there as well, and it took a good bit of
convincing for another semi-recent mass change (although I can't
remember the topic, but it was deemed safe enough to make).

Another common issue with mass code churn like this is that it affects
tooling, such as `hg blame`