From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason Date: Thu, 10 Jun 2010 17:03:57 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH] git-am: Ignore whitespace before patches Message-ID: In-Reply-To: <7vd3vyn84j.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org> On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 16:51, Junio C Hamano wrote: > Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason   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: > >> 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. It doesn't encourage that copy/paste. It's just tangentally mentioned in the commit message since it's a plausable use case. What it does is enable the GMail -> download -> git-am workflow. GMail (and doubtless countless other) E-Mail providers introduce whitespace at the beginning of raw E-Mail messages, while otherwise leaving them intact.