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Re: Strip trailing whitespace

From: Julian Foad <julianfoad_at_btopenworld.com>
Date: Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:27:18 +0100

On Tue, 2009-10-06 at 16:00 +0200, Olaf van der Spek wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 6, 2009 at 3:57 PM, Olaf van der Spek <olafvdspek_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> >> clients support changing the End-Of-Line style, further modifications
> >> such as removing white-space are really beyond the scope of a
> >> version-control tool and would best be handled by other means, such as
>
> The reason it's an issue with VCS is that those spaces introduce
> unnecessary differences and potential conflicts.

Sure, but diff and merge tools can overcome these problems. Most diff
tools (including Subversion's built-in diff) and good merge tools have
an "ignore changes in white space" option.

And all sorts of other edits fall into this category too: reformatting
paragraphs, re-indenting code, updating the "last-printed-time" metadata
in a word-processor file, etc. It's a large class of changes. If we
really want Subversion to normalize the user's files in these respects,
it should be by some kind of general architecture for supporting all
kinds of formatting, and not by adding special code to handle one
particular kind of formatting.

- Julian

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Received on 2009-10-06 16:27:41 CEST

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