Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 000/142] Use the $( ... ) construct for command substitution instead of using the back-quotes

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 11:41:39 -0700

Elia Pinto <[email-masked]> writes:

> This is a second reroll after the 
> Matthieu Moy review. Changes from v1:
>
> - Dropped the silly patches to t6111-rev-list-treesame.sh, 
>   t0204-gettext-reencode-sanity.sh.
>
> - Simple reformatting of the commit message.
>
> - added the toy script used for doing the patch.

In other words, Mattheiu pointed out two examples of breakages and
they were the only mistakes after you re-reviewed the mechanical
changes, and there is no more?

 - Cleaning up is a good thing, but

 - Mechanical and mindless conversion is always error-prone, and

 - Eyeballing each and every change is required, but

 - Nobody has time or energy to go through 140+ patches in one go,
   with enough concentration necessary to do so without making
   mistakes (this applies to yourself, too---producing mechanical
   replacement is a no-cost thing, finding mistakes in mechanical
   replacement takes real effort).

That is why we strongly discourage people from such a whole-tree
clean-up just for the sake of clean-up and nothing else, and instead
encourage them to clean-up as a preparatory step for real work on
the files involved.  Sure, it would not give us as wide a coverage
as a mechanical whole-tree replacement in one-go, but that is the
only practical way to avoid mistakes.

If it were "four patches per every Monday" kind of trickle, we might
be able to spend some review bandwidth while reviewing other
patches, though.

So.... I am not very enthused about reviewing and applying these
patches in their current form.

Thanks.