Linus and whitespace

Gentlemen, I couldn't help but notice a certain Linus B. Torvalds is producing mail with trailing whitespace.

I recall one should (linux-doc-*/Documentation/CodingStyle*:) "Get a decent editor and don't leave whitespace at the end of lines."

Indeed, with my GNU Emacs show-trailing-whitespace X-ray eyespecs on all day, whitespace becomes screaming purple space, so you can't blame me for noticing.

Anyway, I have analyzed his messages, (User-Agent: Alpine 2.00 (LFD 1167 2008-08-23)) and discovered that the whitespace phenomenon almost always occurs if the lines are more than 60 characters long, the "danger zone", we might say.

$ perl -nwle 'print length if / $/' recent_linus_postings|
sort|uniq -c|sort -k 2nr
      1 77
      1 76
     17 75
     17 74
     11 73
     18 72
     12 71
      6 70
      8 69
      6 68
      2 67
      1 66
      2 64
      1 63
      1 40
      9 2

jidanni@jidanni.org wrote:

CodingStyle applies to *patches* not to discussion. In how many of those emails you analyzed were there any trailing whitespace in a patch?

On Mon, 2 Feb 2009, jidanni@jidanni.org wrote:

alpine does it when word-wrapping my messages. 

But I don't word-wrap my _patches_. Those I just insert, and alpine gets it right.

			Linus

On 2009-02-01, jidanni@jidanni.org <jidanni@jidanni.org> wrote:

Boy, do you have too much free time on your hands...

Greetings, Jojo