Hi, On Thu, 5 Feb 2009, layer wrote: > Junio, on 3/25/07 you said: > > I know Linus does not like applying patches with whitespace > fuzziness, but I personally think a merge that ignores > whitespace changes would be a useful thing to have, without > having to call an external specialized merge backend. In other > words, I do not think it is so special a thing to want to, but > it is rather an unfortunate norm. I am not opposed to give > git-merge-recursive a command line option to tell it to merge > ignoring the whitespace-only changes, when it does the 3-way > file-level merge internally. > > Whatever came of this? I tried giving git merge a --ignore-whitespace > argument and the error message that followed show no equivalent > argument. I can think of two issues: - there was this -X patch by Junio, but I think it is a bad interface to pass merge backend options, as it is not closely coupled with the backend. Just imagine this: git merge -X ignore-whitespace -s resolve,recursive Does the "-X ignore-whitespace" impact resolve, recursive, or both? And we'd need some way to specify the option to the backend. I thought that git merge -s resolve,recursive/ignore-whitespace would be a sane syntax, but at least _I_ did not have a need to pass backend options yet. - more fundamental, how should the merge ignoring whitespace work? Which version would it take if the lines agree _except_ for whitespace changes? This needs to be well designed, as we have not only merges (where we have "ours" and "theirs"), but also rebases (where we have "theirs" and _then_ "ours"), and of course recursive merges when there is more than a single merge base (and there, it gets really nasty, so you better have the semantics of the whitespace-ignoring merge put down quite clearly). > It would sure come in handy right now. Is there some other way to do > it that I didn't find searching the mailing list? Of course, you could try to "normalize" the whitespace, and perform the merge after that. Ciao, Dscho -- 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
