# What is the status of merging with whitespace conflicts?

2 messages from 2009-12-02 to 2009-12-02. Participants: Martin Langhoff, Junio C Hamano.
Thread: https://gitlist.dev/t/21825

## Martin Langhoff, 2009-12-02 10:34

Subject: What is the status of merging with whitespace conflicts?
Message-ID: <46a038f90912020234g3094cccbxd8ca80c7c0b32ca4@mail.gmail.com>
URL: https://gitlist.dev/e/46a038f90912020234g3094cccbxd8ca80c7c0b32ca4%40mail.gmail.com

```
A project I hack on [Moodle] is relatively lax when it comes to
trailing whitespace (relatively: we clean it up when we spot it,
sometimes ws sneaks in!).

Most of the time, this has no impact. If you have done some whitespace
cleanups on your branch, however, merging from upstream means endless,
pointless conflicts. Looking at the git merge manpage, and searching
the archives doesn't show anything promising.

Perhaps we have a merge tool that makes it easy to spot-and-resolve
pure whitespace conflicts? In the middle of the merge, there _are_
some actual code conflicts, but it's hard to see them...

cheers,


m
-- 
 martin.langhoff@gmail.com
 martin@laptop.org -- School Server Architect
 - ask interesting questions
 - don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first
 - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff

```

## Junio C Hamano, 2009-12-02 17:04

Subject: Re: What is the status of merging with whitespace conflicts?
Message-ID: <7vy6lli9xh.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
URL: https://gitlist.dev/e/7vy6lli9xh.fsf%40alter.siamese.dyndns.org
In-Reply-To: <46a038f90912020234g3094cccbxd8ca80c7c0b32ca4@mail.gmail.com>

```
I am not working on it, and I didn't hear from anybody who is.  If you
limit the whitespace-only changes to the ones that do not cross line
boundary, it wouldn't be too hard to add.  Probably it would take less
than one summer for a good student.

```