Re: Git merge improvement - "remove spaces/tabs from beginning of line and end of line"

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Aug 11, 2021, 23:12 UTC
Message-ID: <YRRZdmlfBjJTUimj@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <2632907.cDO7J6XS3R@kuhadatko-gl552vw>

On Wed, Aug 11, 2021 at 12:25:10AM +0200, Dušan Červenka | ACRIOS wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> Several times it happened that i added or removed condition in code but a lot 
> of code stayed. Only indention was changed. If there was also other change on 
> some line i had a conflict. And several times it happened that a lot of code 
> was appended instead of replaced (if some line was similar with same 
> indention). This made merging messed and confusing. If we would remove this 
> spaces noise from beginning and end, we could get more acquired merge. What do 
> you think? Of course this is only for looking for most matching lines. At the 
> end the code should keep all necessary spaces.

Have you looked at the whitespace options you can pass to the merge-recursive strategy? E.g.:

  git merge -Xignore-space-at-eol some-branch

It may not do quite what you want, though (it sounds like you are more interested in matching context with whitespace changes than ignoring spaces on modified lines).

-Peff