Re: [PATCH 2/8] maint: remove empty lines at EOF, but excluding modules/*

[Jim Meyering]

Karl Berry wrote:
>     However, I am optimistic that I will be able to make matching
>     changes upstream.
>
> Sorry, but for myself, I think it is a terrible waste of time to be
> thinking about this for fdl*.texi.  The blank lines don't hurt anything

Hi Karl,

I know this hurts your sensibilities, but try to see it from
the other perspective... consistency matters, and fixing difficult-
to-access sources is surely less expensive in the long run than
exempting these shared files from multiple checks in multiple projects.

Isn't it a waste of time/effort to have to remember that Karl says
certain files cannot be subject to such changes?
Otherwise they must be exempted (manually, requiring more time)
from these automated consistency checks in any project, like
autoconf, that version-controls these files.

Seems better to fix it once, at the root, than to work around
it repeatedly.

> and you're not supposed to be modifying those files, so can't we just
> leave them alone?  Argh.
>
> As for these files:
>
>     >> * doc/Copyright/assign.translation.manual: Remove empty lines at EOF.
>     >> * doc/Copyright/request-assign.future: Likewise.
>     >> * doc/Copyright/request-disclaim.changes: Likewise.
>
> The originals of those files live on some inaccessible FSF machine
> somewhere, as far as I know.  You're not really going to take up
> Donald's time with such a thing, are you?

You mean take up a minute or two of his time to have
him run a perl one-liner on those files?  Once removed
they tend to stay gone, unless someone appends text to the
very end of the file.

If those files are so inaccessible, I guess they don't change often,
so my gnulib-local changes may last a long time.

Now I'm sure to be removed from your Christmas list ;-)

Jim