Subject: Re: What's cooking in git.git (topics)

From: [email-masked] (Brian Downing)
Date: Thu, 1 Nov 2007 16:41:31 -0500

On Wed, Oct 31, 2007 at 10:41:06PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> * jc/spht (Tue Oct 2 18:00:27 2007 -0700) 1 commit
>  - git-diff: complain about >=8 consecutive spaces in initial indent
> 
> This is a counterpart of an earlier patch from J. Bruce Fields
> to change "git-apply --whitespace" to make SP{8,} at the
> beginning of line a whitespace error.
> 
> Personally, I am in favor of the stricter check, but I had to
> reject the "git-apply" patch because there was no way to disable
> the additional check without disabling the existing check for
> trailing whitespaces.  We probably would want to revisit that
> one (perhaps with a new option and/or config to selectively
> enable different kinds of whitespace check).

Just to throw in my two cents, I would be strongly opposed to this
going in without some form of configuration to make it work for
spaces-only-indent projects.  I appreciate having whitespace checking,
and I think trailing whitespace and tabs-following-spaces are obviously
bad enough that they should always be flagged.  But flagging leading
spaces makes a legitimate and common coding style yield incredibly
obnoxious-looking diffs.

I don't want to get into another stupid holy war about the superiority
of indent styles (the last one was quite enough, thank you), but there
are real projects out there that have a spaces-only-indent policy and
use Git, and this change as is isn't good for them.

-bcd