On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 13:24, Nick Coghlan wrote:

Removing dead code and bypassing redundant code are both reasonable bug fixes. The kind of change to be avoided is gratuitous replacement of older idioms with newer ones.

What Nick said as I was in the middle of typing when he sent this. =) -Brett

-- Nick Coghlan (via Gmail on Android, so likely to be more terse than usual)

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On Nov 1, 2011, at 1:31 PM, Barry Warsaw wrote:

On Oct 31, 2011, at 06:23 PM, Éric Araujo wrote:

...

I thought that patches that clean up code but don’t fix actual bugs were not done in stable branches. Has this changed?

I hope not. Sure, if they fix actual bugs, that's fine, but as MvL often points out, even innocent looking changes can break code *somewhere*. We don't lose by being conservative with our stable branches.

-Barry

I concur with Barry and MvL. Random code cleanups increase the risk of introducing new bugs. Raymond

On Sat, Nov 5, 2011 at 3:05 AM, Éric Araujo wrote:

Nick and Brett share the opinion that some code cleanups can be considered bugfixes, whereas MvL, Barry and Raymond defend that we never know what can get broken and it’s not worth risking it.

I have added a comment on #13283 (removal of two unused variable in locale.py) to restate this policy, but haven’t asked for a revert; I did not comment on #10519 (Avoid unnecessary recursive function calls), as it can be considered a bugfix and Raymond took part in the discussion and thus implicitly approved the change.

There's always going to be a grey area where it's a judgment call - my opinion is basically the same as what you state in your second paragraph. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan@gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia