[FYI] whitespace removal

[FYI] whitespace removal

[Christian Trefzer]

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Hi there,

while fiddling with some driver development I noticed the disturbing
effect of trailing whitespace while comparing functionally different
versions of a driver. Since even git pukes when it encounters some, I
did
	find -type f | xargs sed -e"s/\(\t\|\ \)*$//" -i
on Linus' current git to estimate the dimension of the mess, and the
resulting diff was 25MB in size. Mebibytes, that is (and yuck, what an
un-word). Granted, for one line that has its whitespace removed we get
roughly eight lines in the diff, so this is mostly bloat.

I ended up sending cleanup patches to the maintainers of the external /
internal repository of that driver respectively, but looking at the size
of this "simple" no-op change, I'd rather leave it to driver or
subsystem maintainers to Do The Right Thing in itty bitty steps.

Not trying to be pedantic here, and even less trying to start a flame
war.

Kind regards,
Chris


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Re: [FYI] whitespace removal

[Dmitry Fedorov]

2006/5/1, Christian Trefzer <ctrefzer@gmx.de>:

> Granted, for one line that has its whitespace removed we get
> roughly eight lines in the diff, so this is mostly bloat.

Use "diff -b".

Re: [FYI] whitespace removal

[Christian Trefzer]

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Hi Dmitry,

On Mon, May 01, 2006 at 12:36:02AM +0700, Dmitry Fedorov wrote:
> 
> Use "diff -b".

diff -b would be useful to ignore whitespace in comparisons, thanks for
opening my eyes. I doubt it would be useful while creating cleanup
patches, though ; )

Kind regards,
Chris

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