Linux: Moving and Changing Code

Posted by Sander_Marechal on Jul 16, 2007 9:26 PM EDT
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In response to a recent merge request, Linus Torvalds explained a best practice when moving and changing code,"when doing renames it is generally *much* nicer to do a 100% rename (perhaps with just _trivial_ changes to make it compile - the include statements etc change, and maybe you want to change the name in the comment header too)." He went on to explain,"doing 'move the code and change it at the same time' is considered bad form. Movement diffs are much harder to read anyway, so the general rule is: move code around _without_ modifying it, so that code movement doesn't really introduce any real changes, and is easier to look through the changes; do the actual changes to the code as a separate thing."

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