git whitespace woes

Question

Conflicts on whitespace suck

Whitespace has ended up being a horrible pain for me while using git.

git config apply.whitespace=strip 

seems to highten your chances of getting conflicts (as you strip unneeded whitespace and then other collaborators see the stripped whitespace as a change to their commits?)

I've tried a few other configurations for apply.whitespace in the past, and maybe one of the other configs solves this, or maybe there's other settings to deal with whitespace that I just haven't come across, but I haven't yet found a clear way to get where I want to be.

I want to silently resolve whitespace conflicts:

I never want to have another conflict on whitespace. If another committer alters whitespace, or I alter whitespace and then have to merge against my own conflicts, i really don't want to know about it. If someone changes my code from K&R style to One True Brace style by changing whitespace, I'd prefer git allow either whitespace setup to win out over having to see conflicts about it. I just don't care enough about whitespace to want to see conflicts about it.

So... ...is there any way that I can configure git to do that?

If it makes any difference, here's my git version, and my current config:

tchalvak:~/ninjawars$ git --version git version 1.6.0.4  tchalvak:~/ninjawars$ git config --list color.branch=auto color.diff=auto color.status=auto color.branch.current=yellow reverse color.branch.local=yellow color.branch.remote=green color.diff.meta=yellow bold color.diff.frag=magenta bold color.diff.old=red bold color.diff.new=green bold color.status.added=yellow color.status.changed=green color.status.untracked=cyan gui.recentrepo=/home/tchalvak/zd/htdocs/cms apply.whitespace=strip user.name=**** user.email=**** alias.co=checkout github.user=tchalvak github.token=**** core.repositoryformatversion=0 core.filemode=true core.bare=false core.logallrefupdates=true [email protected]:tchalvak/ninjawars.git remote.origin.fetch=+refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/* branch.master.remote=origin branch.master.merge=refs/heads/master  

Answer 1

Git1.6.0.4 seems a bit old, especially if you consider that:

• in 1.6.3.4, "git apply --whitespace=fix" did not fix trailing whitespace on an incomplete line
• in 1.6.3.2, "whitespace" attribute that is set was meant to detect all errors known to git, but it told git to ignore trailing carriage-returns.

Could you try with Git1.6.4.1, and rather than setting a global config, set an attribute on the files you want a special whitespace handle, like this patch describes.

In a given directory, create a .gitattributes file.

* -whitespace 

which will ignore any 'whitespace' errors.

Now that will not prevent any conflict due to lack of consistency but that may be worth trying.

---

The patch was a test about:

Only ignore whitespace errors in t/tNNNN-*.sh and the t/tNNNN subdirectories.
Other files (like test libraries) should still be checked.

t/.gitattributes t[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]-*.sh  -whitespace t[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]/*     -whitespace 

---

Note (Git 2.3.2+, Q1 2015, commit 0a80bc9, by Junio C Hamano aka gitster) "git apply --whitespace=fix" is no longer silent:

"git apply --whitespace=fix" fixed whitespace errors in the common context lines but did so without reporting.

When the incoming patch has whitespace errors in a common context line (i.e. a line that is expected to be found and is not modified by the patch), "apply --whitespace=fix" corrects the whitespace errors the line has, in addition to the whitespace error on a line that is updated by the patch.
However, we did not count and report that we fixed whitespace errors on such lines.

Answer 2

If you are going to turn on those settings, you need to schedule a day where ALL source code in your project gets its whitespace uniformly stripped, by running a script, or by saving every file from an editor that will perform the strip on save. Then, all future commits will be policed by the settings, so all should be well going forward.