What is the status of merging with whitespace conflicts?

A project I hack on [Moodle] is relatively lax when it comes to trailing whitespace (relatively: we clean it up when we spot it, sometimes ws sneaks in!).

Most of the time, this has no impact. If you have done some whitespace cleanups on your branch, however, merging from upstream means endless, pointless conflicts. Looking at the git merge manpage, and searching the archives doesn't show anything promising.

Perhaps we have a merge tool that makes it easy to spot-and-resolve pure whitespace conflicts? In the middle of the merge, there _are_ some actual code conflicts, but it's hard to see them...

cheers,

m