Merge, rebase and whitespace fixes

> Hello all,
> 
> recently a tree I've been working on received some thorough whitespace
> adjustments (changing indents from spaces to tabs). This results in
> annoying conflicts when running merges or rebases with my local
> branches. I tried googling around but I couldn't find any helpful
> hints on how to make git cope with this. Any suggestions?
> 

> Giuseppe Bilotta wrote:
>> Hello all,
>>
>> recently a tree I've been working on received some thorough whitespace
>> adjustments (changing indents from spaces to tabs). This results in
>> annoying conflicts when running merges or rebases with my local
>> branches. I tried googling around but I couldn't find any helpful
>> hints on how to make git cope with this. Any suggestions?
>>
>
> Do the same thing to your own tree?

> On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 11:30 PM, Rogan Dawes<lists@dawes.za.net> wrote:
>> Giuseppe Bilotta wrote:
>>> Hello all,
>>>
>>> recently a tree I've been working on received some thorough whitespace
>>> adjustments (changing indents from spaces to tabs). This results in
>>> annoying conflicts when running merges or rebases with my local
>>> branches. I tried googling around but I couldn't find any helpful
>>> hints on how to make git cope with this. Any suggestions?
>>>
>> Do the same thing to your own tree?
> 
> I tried doing the whitespace cleanup on top of the last patch, but the
> merge still conflicted.
> 
> The interesting thing is that there's patchset from Robert Fitzsimons
> that goes back to August 2005 (!) that does a couple of git apply
> cleanups and in particular adds the --ignore-whitespace option that I
> would need ...
> 
> http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/7876
> 
> but the patch apparently never made it into mainline ...
> 

>> I tried doing the whitespace cleanup on top of the last patch, but the
>> merge still conflicted.
>>
>> The interesting thing is that there's patchset from Robert Fitzsimons
>> that goes back to August 2005 (!) that does a couple of git apply
>> cleanups and in particular adds the --ignore-whitespace option that I
>> would need ...
>>
>> http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/7876
>>
>> but the patch apparently never made it into mainline ...
>>
>
> One thing I have done in the past when trying to merge two diverged
> trees was to format each commit in each tree to a common standard.
>
> One of the ways in which the trees had diverged was whitespace
> (non-meaningful) changes, so I used the Eclipse formatter as part of a
> "git filter-branch" script to make sure that I was ony looking at
> meaningful changes between the trees at each point. This significantly
> simplified the process.