From: Junio C Hamano Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2006 21:34:21 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH] Don't use $author_name undefined when $from contains no /\s In-Reply-To: <87fydkj8q1.fsf@penguin.cs.ucla.edu> Paul Eggert writes: > Junio C Hamano writes: > >> I see no good reason, other than saving a single byte from the >> output stream perhaps. > > That wasn't the motivation. Rather, it was to support the > style where people use editors that highlight trailing > blanks, since trailing blanks can cause trouble in some > contexts (e.g., they can change the semantics of C programs > and Makefiles). When examining unified diffs, any added or > removed trailing blanks will be easy to spot with such an > editor, but only if "diff -u" doesn't output any trailing > blanks of its own. If "trailing space" highlighting picks up the first column blank in "diff -u" output, that highlighting feature is *broken*. "git diff --color" does the whitespace breakage highlighting, but it knows that the first column *is* not payload and does not highlight it. > You can read more about this at the thread that inspired > the diffutils change, rooted here: > > http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-utils/2006-09/msg00005.html I've read it. It was not convincing and was not even an amusing read.