threads / discuss / 25063

git revert ignore whitespace

Subject: git revert ignore whitespace

## tl;dr

5 messages between Sep 10, 2010 and Sep 10, 2010.

replies: 4people: 3as markdown or json

Steven· Sep 10, 2010, 07:57 UTC · lore
Hi,
Please CC me, as I'm not subscribed to the list.

I want to revert a specific commit using 'git revert', however in the meantime there were some whitespace changes. Is it still possible to do this? The manual doesn't mention a -w or --ignore-whitespace option for git revert.

I'm using git 1.7.0.2 (msysgit)

Kind regards, Steven

-- 
Rarely do people communicate; they just take turns talking.
Jeff King· Sep 10, 2010, 14:21 UTC · re: Steven · lore

Re: git revert ignore whitespace

On Fri, Sep 10, 2010 at 09:57:52AM +0200, Steven wrote:
> I want to revert a specific commit using 'git revert',
> however in the meantime there were some whitespace changes.
> Is it still possible to do this? The manual doesn't mention a -w or
> --ignore-whitespace option for git revert.

In theory there is no reason we couldn't support "-w", but I don't think there is a way to do it currently.

You could just manually do the revert. Something like:
  git diff-tree -p $commit | git apply --ignore-whitespace
  git commit -m "revert '`git log -1 --format=%s $commit`'"

which is more or less what revert will do (actually, I think it will do more with 3-way merges during the application, but the point is that a revert in git is nothing more than achieving a tree state that pulls out the reverted content, and then making a commit. It has no special status in the history graph).

-Peff
Steven· Sep 10, 2010, 14:54 UTC · re: Jeff King · lore

Re: git revert ignore whitespace

On Fri, September 10, 2010 16:21, Jeff King wrote:
Show 9 quoted lines
>
> In theory there is no reason we couldn't support "-w", but I don't think
> there is a way to do it currently.
>
> You could just manually do the revert. Something like:
>
>   git diff-tree -p $commit | git apply --ignore-whitespace
>   git commit -m "revert '`git log -1 --format=%s $commit`'"
>
Thanks for the tip Jeff.

I had to modify the commands a bit to get it to work. Here they are: git diff-tree -p <commithash> | git apply --reverse --ignore-whitespace -C0 git add <file(s)> git commit -m "revert '`git log -1 --format=%s $commit`'"

The --reverse is necessary to revert a patch, I needed the -C0 parameter as well because the line above changed as well. This was a fairly simple example, but I imagine it won't work at all with a larger history, especially with more changes in the relevant sections and additions/deletions. I believe git revert does take these into account?

Kind regards, Steven

Jeff King· Sep 10, 2010, 15:24 UTC · re: Steven · lore

Re: git revert ignore whitespace

On Fri, Sep 10, 2010 at 04:54:11PM +0200, Steven wrote:
Show 13 quoted lines
> > You could just manually do the revert. Something like:
> >
> >   git diff-tree -p $commit | git apply --ignore-whitespace
> >   git commit -m "revert '`git log -1 --format=%s $commit`'"
> 
> I had to modify the commands a bit to get it to work.
> Here they are:
> git diff-tree -p <commithash> | git apply --reverse --ignore-whitespace -C0
> git add <file(s)>
> git commit -m "revert '`git log -1 --format=%s $commit`'"
>
> The --reverse is necessary to revert a patch, I needed the -C0 parameter
> as well because the line above changed as well.

Oops. Yeah, obviously I just typed that straight into the email and did not actually run it. :) The --reverse is definitely necessary. Using -C0 can help, but it can also be dangerous, as context lines help apply make sure it's in the right spot.

> This was a fairly simple example, but I imagine it won't work at all with
> a larger history, especially with more changes in the relevant sections
> and additions/deletions. I believe git revert does take these into
> account?

Yeah, the question is really whether the reverse diff from the reverted commit applies to your current tree. Nearby changes obviously make that harder.

Once upon a time revert itself was implemented like this (see 045f82c, which introduced revert and uses "diff | apply"). These days it is only a little more complex. It uses the 3-way merge machinery, which should do better with finding minimal conflicts when the context has changed, and will do rename detection (and when the patch doesn't apply, will actually put in conflict markers, which is a nice place to start with resolving it).

Revert is written in C these days, but you can see the shell script version using git-merge-recursive in contrib/examples/git-revert.sh. However, I don't think there is an easy way to ask merge-recursive to ignore whitespace changes.

-Peff
Junio C Hamano· Sep 10, 2010, 16:34 UTC · re: Jeff King · lore

Re: git revert ignore whitespace

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:
> Revert is written in C these days, but you can see the shell script
> version using git-merge-recursive in contrib/examples/git-revert.sh.
> However, I don't think there is an easy way to ask merge-recursive to
> ignore whitespace changes.
See jf/merge-ignore-ws in 'pu' ;-)

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