On 30-11-2009 11:36, William Allen Simpson wrote:

Over the past several days, David Miller (with help from Joe Perches)
made sweeping changes to the format of conditional statements in the
net tree -- the equivalent of mass patches that change spaces.

This makes writing patches for multiple versions of the tree very
difficult, and will make future pullups problematic.  It's enough to
make a grown man cry....  Patching conflicts everywhere!

CodingStyle is mute on this issue.  Does Linus have a preference?

My personal practice (based on decades of open source projects) has
been to use a form already used in the same file or section of code,
matching the existing practice.

If this is to be done everywhere, CodingStyle (and SubmittingPatches)
should be updated.

Currently, roughly 19% (7855 lines) of the -2.6 tree uses leading form:

	if (condition
	    && condition
	    && (condition
	        || condition
	        || condition)) {

Single spaced is also fairly common:

	if (condition
	 && condition
	 && (condition
	  || condition
	  || condition)) {

The advantage of the leading form is *readability* due to indentation,
ease of patching and reading patches (changes affect only 1 line,
instead of previous and following lines), and especially conditionals
within #if sections.  Also, shorter lines (by 3 characters).

The other 81% uses trailing form, often with odd random line breaks:

	if (condition &&
             condition && (condition || condition ||
	    condition)) {

Miller (with Perches) changed hundreds (thousands?) of these to
trailing form.  This results in a number of hilarious examples --
lines with both leading and trailing, lines with only &&, etc.  A
small sample for illustration:

Yes, it's even enough to make a grown man laugh....

Jarek P.