[Plplot-devel] Trailing whitespace issues to be fixed post-release

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

For your information, I recently discovered we still have trailing
whitespace issues consisting of tabs (or possibly even mixtures of
blanks followed by tabs) because the current script to deal with that
issue only removed trailing blanks.  I have now updated that script to
remove all combinations of trailing tabs and blanks.  I also
changed its name from

scripts/remove_trailing_blanks.sh --> scripts/remove_trailing_whitespace.sh

That new version of the script appears to work fine (if sed is
available on your platform), but it turns out we have a fair number of
files that have trailing whitespace issues so this commit would be way
too intrusive to push before release.

So I have decided to keep this new version of the script on a private
topic branch for now.  After the release I plan to try it again, test
those many file changes with the comprehensive test script, and then
finally push the result.  N.B. until that occurs, you should expect
commands like "git am" to complain about whitespace issues.

Once we are free of such trailing whitespace issues, git has methods
of enforcing no trailing white space on certain files for commit, see
<http://stackoverflow.com/questions/591923/make-git-automatically-remove-trailing-whitespace-before-committing>
But the huge number of possibilities discussed there seem to be fairly
complex and have various drawbacks so I will likely just stick with
running this simple script from time to time.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
__________________________

Linux-powered Science
__________________________