I completely agree with Joel. I've done major refactoring work by making a series of minor alterations that clearly don't change anything. This approach takes a

I completely agree with Joel. I've done major refactoring work by making a series of minor alterations that clearly don't change anything. This approach takes a lot less time and doesn't introduce nearly as many bugs. Our svn repository is at revision 4995, and that's forked from a project that's 4 years older. Imagine how many of those commits have been bug fixes, and you'll see the big problem with rewriting.