From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Thu, 10 Jun 2010 16:51:40 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH] git-am: Ignore whitespace before patches
Message-ID: <7vd3vyn84j.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <1273944188-9472-1-git-send-email-avarab@gmail.com>

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason  <avarab@gmail.com> writes:

> Change git-am to ignore whitespace (as defined by sh's read) at the
> beginning of patches.
>
> Empty lines are wont to creep in at the beginning of patches, here's
> an example from a raw Gmail attachment:
>
>     20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20  20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20  |                |
>     20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20  20 20 20 20 20 20 20 0a  |               .|
>     52 65 74 75 72 6e 2d 50  61 74 68 3a 20 3c 61 76  |Return-Path: <av|
>
> Whitespace is also likely to appear if the user copy/pastes the patch
> around, e.g. via a pastebin, or any any number of other cases. This
> harms nothing and makes git-am's detection more fault tolerant.

Actually cut-and-paste is often a major source of whitespace breakage
(including tabs silently being expanded), and I personally think a patch
like this to encourage the practice is going in a wrong direction.