Joe Perches wrote:

On Sat, 2009-12-05 at 07:43 -0500, William Allen Simpson wrote:

quoted

My main objection to these sweeping patches is that it makes it much
more difficult to maintain and apply patches across different versions of
the tree.

I think you underestimate the value of
standardization and overestimate the
quantity of work to sort it out for
the -stable versions.

As I mentioned to somebody in private email (having kept rough track), it
took around 9 hours this week for my 8 patch series, spread over 3 days
because of the tedium.  Fix rejects, visually check patch against previous
version, compile, test -- at least 1/2 to 1 hour for each numbered patch.
Plus time to resubmit the patch series to the list again.

Of course, that was only for the initial patches already posted to the
list.  I've many more -- awaiting approval for the previous set....

Eventually, I have to do the same for each supported -stable version.

Multiply by thousands of contributors.

Hopefully, you did the same, carefully checking your regexp generated
patches visually line by line, and compiling, and testing every driver
in this large patch individually.

I'm not a big believer in making trivial formatting changes and assuming
they work.  Or that I didn't fumble fingers somehow.  I've made many such
stupid mistakes over the years.