Re: Patches with independent changes

[Paul Eggert]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> A variable that becomes unused as result of
> a change should be removed as part of that change.

That guideline makes sense to me too.  Some other software projects 
don't do that: their developers split such patches into pieces, one to 
remove the need for a variable, the other to remove the variable.  To my 
mind this is mostly make-work, and its costs exceed its benefits, and 
I'm glad we don't insist on such things with Emacs.

> >   > you cannot chmod a file that is open ... the chmod call will fail.
> >
> > Where is this documented?  Does the problem occur if any process has the
> > file open, or only if the current process has it open?  What is errno
> > after the failure?  This problem does not occur on POSIXish platforms;
> > if it happens under Microsoft Windows the incompatibility should be
> > documented (in Gnulib, if the problem is generic to GNU applications).
>
> Then document it, please.

We shouldn't document a statement that may be mistaken.

> Removal of this code _could_ have constituted an additional change
> unrelated to the original bug.

The patch I mentioned is simpler than the patch in trunk bzr 116116. 
It's not an additional change compared to 116116; on the contrary, 
116116 is the one containing an additional change.

That being said, I agree that we should let this code alone during the 
feature freeze.