rebasing, git-am and whitespace cleanup conundrims

Hola!

i'm going through a rebase of a long series of patches (~50) that have quite a bit of trailing whitespace. Once the rebase is done on my repo (resolving all the code level conflicts), I want to re-rebase it on top of the same commit but cleaning up trailing whitespace.

The problem is that upstream has 'some' trailing whitespace. The policy is to reject "new" trailing whitespace and cleanup in stages to avoid big merge conflicts and stuff.

Now, once the early patches are "in" with --whitespace=trim, the following patches don't apply anymore :-/ and I can't just trim whitespace in the whole patch series automatically.

Is there any way to get git-apply to ignore whitespace differences when applying like GNU patch -l?

When -3 is passed, it must be calling the merge utility from merge_file() -- which doesn't do 'ignore-whitespace'. But if it's a straight patch application, it should be possible to do something like that... maybe?

cheers,