@ncoghlan you seem to be one of the last editors of that file, what are your thoughts ? Should I continue doing that for the whole file ? Is it not necessary ?

When translating that file to French, one of our new translator left it like this but they need to be spaced out

@birkenfeld you seem to be the one who wrote those lines, 12 years ago 😱 What are your thoughts ?

I'll show up as the original author of all docs files that are old enough, since I committed the conversion from TeX to rst/Sphinx. But most of the content is much older still :)

I'm neutral in whether this is a good idea; historically we have frowned upon such wholesale minor style changes.

I'm neutral in whether this is a good idea; historically we have frowned upon such wholesale minor style changes.

That's true. However, the Helping with Documentation section in the Developer's Guide currently seems to support making such doc fixes and minor improvements. Selected quotes:

Issues vary from typos to unclear documentation and items lacking documentation."

Simple typos don’t require issues of their own, but, instead, submit a pull request directly.

In this specific case, this change will be rejected for two reasons:

1. The em-dashes used here should indeed not be surrounded by spaces. The current form is correct!
2. These distutils docs are considered legacy, so to my understanding they should only be changed to address major issues.