Re: [boost] [Intrusive] Cleaning up trailing white space

Subject: Re: [boost] [Intrusive] Cleaning up trailing white space
From: Lars Viklund (zao_at_[hidden])
Date: 2012-05-29 03:27:10

On Tue, May 29, 2012 at 09:11:52AM +0200, Olaf van der Spek wrote:
> On Tue, May 29, 2012 at 12:57 AM, John Wiegley <jwiegley_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> >>>>>> Dave Abrahams <dave_at_[hidden]> writes:
> >
> >> Yup. Â But that's not so great either when you start working in someone
> >> else's file and it starts adding spurious changes. Â And yes, I've tried
> >> packages that try to be smarter about that. Â Didn't work for me, so far.
> >
> > I think I found a package once that only eliminates spurious whitespace in
> > lines that you've changed. Â But yeah, it wasn't smart enough to be
> > worthwhile. Â I've never found a good answer to this either.
> 
> Can't the script be ran once for the entire repo?

The downside of making "pointless" changes like that is that you get a
commit that will look like the file was changed, effectively making all
diffs across that commit have lots of modifications obscuring any real
changes.

The reason you only clean up whitespace around where you're working is
that the whitespace changes are tightly coupled with actual real
relevant semantical changes.

Doing it on every file in the repository will inflict this pain on every
single file, not to mention that it ruins the "last modified" field of
SVN browsers, claiming that every single file in the repos was
"last modified: 9 days ago" or so while they might've not really have
been touched in many years.

-- 
Lars Viklund | zao_at_[hidden]