Junio C Hamano <junkio@xxxxxxx> writes: > I see no good reason, other than saving a single byte from the > output stream perhaps. That wasn't the motivation. Rather, it was to support the style where people use editors that highlight trailing blanks, since trailing blanks can cause trouble in some contexts (e.g., they can change the semantics of C programs and Makefiles). When examining unified diffs, any added or removed trailing blanks will be easy to spot with such an editor, but only if "diff -u" doesn't output any trailing blanks of its own. You can read more about this at the thread that inspired the diffutils change, rooted here: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-utils/2006-09/msg00005.html > Does that mean if you have a line that has only one TAB (perhaps > caused by broken autoindent in the editor), that is "input data" > and is output as "SP TAB LF"? Yes, that's correct. In the highlighting-editor scenario, such a line would be highlighted, but the people who want to see trailing white space highlighted will indeed want the highlighting here, so it's fine. This change was not motivated by broken MUAs. Broken MUAs are a problem that GNU 'patch' has already had to deal with, for many years. The change was motivated by a desire to make significant trailing white space easier to find, when people are examining text that contains some diffs and some other stuff. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html