Re: feature-request: git "cp" like there is git mv.

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Mar 19, 2018, 20:03 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqq370vvnmo.fsf@gitster-ct.c.googlers.com>
In-Reply-To: <20180318210908.3ed94777.stefanmoch@mail.de>

Stefan Moch <stefanmoch@mail.de> writes:

> Are such redundant checks in general a pattern worth searching
> for and cleaning up globally? Or is this rather in the category
> of cleaning up only when noticed?

A clean-up patch that is otherwise a no-op is still welcome as it will improve the health of the codebase, but they become hindrances if there are too many of them to consume the review bandwidth that would otherwise be better spent on other non no-op topics, and/or if they add too many merge conflicts with other non no-op topics in flight.

The amount of such negative impact a no-op clean-up patch can have on the project does not depend on how the issue was discovered, so we do not even have to know if the issue was discovered by actively hunting or by noticing while working on a near-by area.

It is possible that by actively looking for, you may end up producing more of the no-op clean-up patches and can more easily interfere with other topics, which we may need to discourge or at least ask you to slow down. On the other hand, issues discovered while working on a near-by area would typically not increase conflicts with other topics in flight over the conflicts that would be caused by that real work you were doing in a near-by area already, so in that sense, "only when noticed" is a practical way to avoid the clean-up fatigue.