Unnecessary extra output variable in theme_links.

Setting status...

The patch in the issue summary no longer applies.

I believe the $output variable is now in use in theme_links() function. So the initial patch unnecessary-extra-output.patch is no longer relevant.

I am not sure if we should fix the minor indentation issue here with the attached patch.

The extra variable assignment still should be removed. It comes immediately after the first assignment, only inside an if statement. Maybe this was a loop at one time and the $output string had to be set to empty at the start of each pass.

As for the indentation issue, we generally do not do extra tasks like this that are out of scope of the issue. If we were already modifying that line then it wouldn't be a problem, but this issue has nothing to do with it. There are at least two reasons why:

1. It makes patches harder to review. It may not be a big deal here, but in larger patches it does.
2. The more important reason is that the more we change things, the more chance there is of a collision with another patch. When one of those patches gets committed, the other will need to be rerolled. A simple change like this could result in a patch (possibly a more important patch) getting delayed to a later release window.

The thing to do in this case is to search for any other active issues that may already be cleaning up theme.inc docblocks and add it there or post a follow-up issue to fix the indentation if there isn't one. Although I wouldn't bother for such a minor issue.

Sure @dcam and thanks for the detailed explanation!

Please see attached patch which will remove extra variable assignment.

No problem. I'm glad to help.

This is RTBC.

Random failure.

Committed to 7.x - thanks!