threads / discuss / 35531

Looking for pre-commit hook to check whitespace errors but not for all files

Subject: Looking for pre-commit hook to check whitespace errors but not for all files

## tl;dr

3 messages between Dec 14, 2013 and Dec 16, 2013.

replies: 2people: 3as markdown or json

Paul Menzel· Dec 14, 2013, 15:28 UTC · lore
Dear git folks,

in coreboot we try to check for whitespace errors before committing. Of course a pre-commit hook is the way to go, but unfortunately it is not so simple (at least for me) as the following requirements exist.

1. Only the files actually committed should be checked. That means
running `git commit -a`, abort that and then running `git commit
some/file` should only check `some/file` for whitespace errors.
2. There are certain files that are allowed to have whitespace errors.
In our case these are `*.patch` and `*.diff` files which by design seem
to contain whitespace error.
Currently the whole tree is checked, which takes a lot of time [1].

I tried to come up with a patch [2], but failed so far. Best would be to have

    $ git diff --check --only-committed-files --exclude "*patch$"
where I could not find a way for the last to switches.
Currently, I would use
    $ git diff-index --cached --name-only $against -- | grep -v patch$

and pass that list to some whitespace check program. Unfortunately that still does not fulfill the first requirement.

What am I missing to solve this elegantly?
Thanks,
Paul

[1] http://review.coreboot.org/gitweb?p=coreboot.git;a=blob;f=util/lint/lint-stable-003-whitespace;h=1e824a1e76e37ce641b91c75f2f78e0e2abfd37f;hb=HEAD [2] http://review.coreboot.org/#/c/3340/

John Keeping· Dec 14, 2013, 16:59 UTC · re: Paul Menzel · lore

Re: Looking for pre-commit hook to check whitespace errors but not for all files

On Sat, Dec 14, 2013 at 04:28:14PM +0100, Paul Menzel wrote:
Show 29 quoted lines
> in coreboot we try to check for whitespace errors before committing. Of
> course a pre-commit hook is the way to go, but unfortunately it is not
> so simple (at least for me) as the following requirements exist.
> 
> 1. Only the files actually committed should be checked. That means
> running `git commit -a`, abort that and then running `git commit
> some/file` should only check `some/file` for whitespace errors.
> 
> 2. There are certain files that are allowed to have whitespace errors.
> In our case these are `*.patch` and `*.diff` files which by design seem
> to contain whitespace error.
> 
> Currently the whole tree is checked, which takes a lot of time [1].
> 
> I tried to come up with a patch [2], but failed so far. Best would be to
> have
> 
>     $ git diff --check --only-committed-files --exclude "*patch$"
> 
> where I could not find a way for the last to switches.
> 
> Currently, I would use
> 
>     $ git diff-index --cached --name-only $against -- | grep -v patch$
> 
> and pass that list to some whitespace check program. Unfortunately that
> still does not fulfill the first requirement.
> 
> What am I missing to solve this elegantly?

I think you want to combine .gitattributes with something like the diff-index above:

	$ cat >.gitattributes <<-EOF
	*.patch whitespace=false
	*.diff whitespace=false
	EOF
	$ git diff-index --check --cached $against --
Junio C Hamano· Dec 16, 2013, 19:06 UTC · re: Paul Menzel · lore

Re: Looking for pre-commit hook to check whitespace errors but not for all files

Paul Menzel <paulepanter@users.sourceforge.net> writes:
> 1. Only the files actually committed should be checked. That means
> running `git commit -a`, abort that and then running `git commit
> some/file` should only check `some/file` for whitespace errors.
Doesn't hooks/pre-commit.sample we ship already gets this right?
	$ git init foobar && cd foobar
	$ mv .git/hooks/pre-commit.sample .git/hooks/pre-commit
        $ for i in foo bar; do echo $i >$i.txt; done
        $ git commit -m initial
        $ for i in foo bar; do echo "$i " >$i.txt; done
        $ git commit -a
        bar.txt:1: trailing whitespace.
        +bar
        foo.txt:1: trailing whitespace.
        +foo
        $ git commit foo.txt
        foo.txt:1: trailing whitespace.
        +foo
> 2. There are certain files that are allowed to have whitespace errors.

As John Keeping alraedy pointed out, you can use the attributes mechanism to mark what kind of payload each path has to control this kind of thing.

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