Re: [PATCH RFC 2/2] diff: teach diff to expand tabs in output

> Jacob Keller <jacob.e.keller@intel.com> writes:
>
>> I'm really not a fan of how the ws code ended up. It seems pretty ugly
>> and weird to hack in the expand_tabs stuff here. However, I'm really not
>> sure how else I could handle this. Additionally, I'm not 100% sure
>> whether this interacts with format-patch or other machinery which may
>> well want some way to be excluded. Thoughts?
>
> As long as you do the same as "do we color the output?  no, no, we
> are format-patch and must not color" logic to refrain from expanding
> the tabs, you should be OK.
>
>> I think there also may be some wonky bits when performing the tab
>> expansion during whitespace checks, due to the way we expand, because I
>> don't think that the tabexpand function takes into account the "current"
>> location when adding a string, so it very well may not be correct.... I
>> am unsure if there is a good way to fix this.
>
> This "feature" is limited to the diff output, so one way may be to
> leave the code as-is and pipe the output to a filter that is similar
> to /usr/bin/expand but knows that the first column is special (this
> is the part that "this is limited to diff" kicks in).  You may even
> be able to implement it as a new option to "expand(1)" and then
> people who aren't Git users would also benefit.
>