Doing massive source changes

[Lubos Lunak]

 Hello,

 I have a patch that is 32M big and I rather wonder when to commit it.

 The patch specifically is string rtl:: prefix removal. These changes 
regularly show up in gerrit patches for review, but I think we have somewhat 
better EasyHacks for new developers than rather mindless search&replace, and 
it's somewhat annoying to review such diffs as well. So instead I've done the 
change over the entire codebase where possible.

 The problem is, the change is so extensive that it touches pretty much 
everything ("9117 files changed, 92833 insertions(+), 95662 deletions(-)"). 
Given that we branched 4-0 a short time back, this will probably mean 
backporting will often need adjusting. So the options I see:

- wait until before 4-1 branch-off (or do not do such a big change at all) - 
this would mean there still would be these changes done in small bits by 
other people (including the gerrit review overhead)

- push now, only to master - this would mean more likely conflicts when 
backporting changes

- push now, including to 4-0 - I can successfully do a full build, including 
make check, and I've avoided public API modules (sal, salhelper, cppu, 
cppuhelper, odk - any others?), so this hopefully should be safe, but most of 
the changes have been done using sed, so there may be something that I've 
missed

 Does somebody have a preference? I consider the last one to be the best 
option.

-- 
 Lubos Lunak
 l.lunak at suse.cz