ok to do reformatting commits?

[Evan Laforge]

On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 7:23 PM, Richard Eisenberg <eir at cis.upenn.edu> wrote:
> Thanks for volunteering to do this work, but I'm afraid now is a terrible time to do it. I know of three significant patches that are about to be committed, and your reformatting would cause quite a few merge conflicts. If there is a lull between a feature freeze and a ghc-8.0 fork, that would be the ideal time, to my mind.

Ok, I'll shelve the idea until further notice.

> That said, I remain unconvinced that a rigid commitment to 80-char lines is in our best interest. My personal vote is to continue to have 80 characters as a guideline but to keep the current practice of allowing programmer discretion.

In my case it's not so much discretion, but that in the absence of
clear guidance, I default to conservatively trying to do whatever the
file already does.  So there's a bit of contradiction where the local
convention says to do one thing but lint says another, and without a
tie-breaker I'd go with local convention.  In which case best to turn
off the lint, and put a guideline in the doc.

Also I had no idea about the under_scores means private thing, I just
picked what seemed to be prevalent in the surroundings.  That would be
another good thing to put into
https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Commentary/CodingStyle