Re: [Libmesh-devel] svn commit of whitespace changes

[Roy S. <roy...@ic...>]

On Fri, 2 Dec 2011, Derek Gaston wrote:

> We somewhat recently implemented commit hooks on our repository that
> force no trailing whitespace (ie, reject a commit if it has trailing
> whitespace).  I thought it was going to be draconian at first... But I
> actually like it a lot because it keeps out a _bunch_ of superfluous
> diffs.

Oh, yeah, I definitely like the trailing whitespace removal.  I just
don't like it being mixed with other changes.

> We just use some Emacs rules that automatically delete trailing
> whitespace... and a small Perl script that others can use before
> checking in.

It sounds like the best solution may be to remove trailing white
space now, all at once, to prevent fixes to legacy trailing white
space from bloating future diffs.  (except when other future commits
inadvertently add whitespace; want to share your Emacs rules, and I'll
hunt up something for vim?)

I'll do the big change now.  "sed -i -E 's/[[:space:]]*$//g'" seems to
work out right.  I won't touch the contrib files; I'd rather keep the
diffs between us and upstream as small as possible there.

I do love the irony of complaining about the size of a 600-line diff,
then preparing a 130,000 line diff myself.
---
Roy