Hello,
A lot of kernel developers consider purely-syntactic changes (ie. fixing whitespace issues) to be noisy/disruptive. Therefore, even when such changes are for the better (according to the coding style, etc), they do not usually make it to the "mainline".
It has been suggested that such syntactic changes be performed and submitted only when related (nearby) semantic changes are performed at the same time. This is hard to do, however; the developers who want to make semantic changes are not necesarily the same as those who want to make syntactic changes, and thus they may not even realize their opportunity to fix, for example, whitespace issues which exist the function they are changing.
I introduce the concept of watchpoints. In this particular case, a watchpoint is the record of a line (or lines) in a file which has some issue that is not serious enough to warrant a change on its own, but could be changed in the future if a nearby change was made. More generally, a watchpoint can "watch" a specific part of a file for changes in the future.
The point is that git can track a set of watchpoints so that watchpoint line-numbers stay in sync with the actual file contents. Adding a line to the beginning a file should probably jump up all the watchpoint line-numbers for that file. Now, git may also check to-be-applied patches for changes that touch a watched line.
Does this sound like a viable or even useful idea for a file tracker?
Kind regards, Vegard Nossum
