Re: [PATCH v2] git-am: Ignore whitespace before patches

From: Jay Soffian <jaysoffian@gmail.com>
Date: Aug 12, 2010, 19:13 UTC
Message-ID: <AANLkTinDHvwHLZfj6DDPtV39Z2xhDZREiqwdt5cjiaLP@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <1281556645-23361-1-git-send-email-avarab@gmail.com>

On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 3:57 PM, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

>> 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.
>
> I disagree and think git-am should be smarter. Any human looking at
> something like a GMail mail.txt download will clearly see that it's a
> patch, but git-am is pedantic and doesn't skip past whitespace at the
> beginning of the file.

The point of git-am being pedantic is to prevent the original patch from being applied w/silent corruption (e.g., tabs-to-spaces).

Perhaps, before making git-am less strict, we should modify format-patch to include a sha1 of the diff output so that corruption can be reliably detected by git-am.

Just a thought.

j.