[Koha-devel] Git whitespace whining

[Jerry Van Baren]

Rick Welykochy wrote:
> I am new to git and its brain twisting operation. Nonetheless the Koha
> version control system is starting to work with me.
> 
> The gazillions of warning messages that its spews out about trailing
> white space produce so much useless noise that I cannot see the real
> warnings or error message without considerable effort.
> 
> This warning message provides no useful information.

Incorrect: it is pointing out lots of landmines waiting to blow your 
personal life to shreds.

> I propose we disable it.
> ------------------------

NO NO NO NO NO!

> I you disagree then please provide an example of a source code file,
> language processor or other instance where trailing white space actaully
> can cause trouble. I'm at a loss to find such.

The problem is that whitespace causes totally unnecessary merge 
conflicts.  The result is you (or worse, an upstream maintainer) wastes 
valuable time picking through merge conflicts that should not have 
happened.  Bugs are inevitably introduced when a merge conflict is 
resolved incorrectly.

Your time could otherwise be spent doing fun and useful things - hence 
my assertion that the whitespace damage *will* harm your personal life.

It is unfortunate that the current code base has whitespace damage.  The 
correct solution is to coordinate a whitespace undamage day, run a 
script to remove the whitespace damage from the master repo, and have 
everybody resync with the master repo.

This will be painful, but it is painful only once.  Leaving whitespace 
damage in the source will be a never ending source of pain (death by 
1,000 paper cuts).

I've been there and made the wrong decision to not fix the whitespace 
damage.  For the remainder of the project I sorely regretted not 
"tearing the band-aid(r) off" once.

> cheers
> rickw

Best regards,
gvb