Re: gratuitous changes

[Stefan Monnier]

> I *am* careful. I just happen to think that keeping trailing whitespace
> around is ugly and a PITA, so I have delete-trailing-whitespace on
> write-file-functions.

If we all agree to set things up this way, it's fine.
Otherwise it's a recipe for painful CVS merging.
[ Note: such a setting can introduce subtle bugs with lines ending in
  an elisp space constant such as ?\ , so we have to be careful with it. ]

> Even if I took it out, if you maintaing your own
> local changes with trailing whitespace you're going to be bitten by it
> every now and then.

These were not my trailing whitespaces, but the ones that were in
the file to start with and that you removed in a large scale, thus
introducing conflicts in code that you probably didn't even look at.

> As you said yourself that you don't like the
> whitespace and delete it sometimes, I don't understand why don't keep
> your changes that way and save yourself the trouble...

I don't understand what you're getting at here.

Note that there is in my mind a significant difference between
purely spuriuous whitespace and whitespace which will naturally be
re-introduced by editing (such as whitespace-only lines which will be
reintroduced by the next TAB).
I think the difference is actually not just in my mind: virtually
every file in Emacs CVS has many whitespace-only lines, whereas
most of those files have almost no trailing whitespace on non-empty
lines.

I'm not necessarily opposed to stripping all whitespace-only
line, but then let's do it once and for all in a single commit
so even though it will fuck up `cvs diff' output, I will
at least know how I can trivially resolve all the conflicts.


        Stefan "about 200 locally modified files"