Linux: Moving and Changing Code

“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 (a traditional diff will show it as a
new-file + delete, of course), so the general rule is: move code
around _without_ modifying it, so that code movement (whether it’s
a whole file, or just a set of functions between files) 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.’ He went on to note why this is especially important during
Linux development, ‘where patches are the main way people
communicate…'”

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