code cleanup vs backports

[Julian Reschke <ju...@gmx.de>]

Hi there,

I recently had to backport stuff, and it turned out to be harder than it 
should have been. This was caused by code cleanup changes that weren't 
backported and thus caused merge conflicts.

Now code cleanup is a good thing, and it needs to be done, for 
performance, robustness, clarity etc.

I'd like to suggest a few rules that we hopefully can agree on:

1) By any means do code cleanup, but try to avoid commits that span 
unrelated parts of the code; when done, see whether the change can 
easily be ported back into previous branches in order to avoid 
unnecessary code divergence.

2) Resist the temptation of combining bug fixes with stylistic changes 
(formatting, use of "final", etc) in other places of the code; this 
makes it unnecessarily hard to see what actually changed. In doubt, make 
two separate commits and label them accordingly.

Best regards, Julian