Is a format-only update a frivolous Git commit?

Question

I have a Python project that I'm working on for research. I've been working on two different machines, and I recently discovered that half of my files used tabs and the other half used spaces.

Python objected to this when I attempted to edit and run a file from one machine on the other, so I'd like to switch everything to spaces instead of tabs. However, this seems like a waste of a Git commit - running 'git diff' on the uncommitted-but-correct files makes it look like I'm wiping out and replacing the entire file.

Is there a way around this? That is, is there some way that I can "hide" these (IMO) frivolous changes?

Answer 1

There is, it's called a rebase - however, you'd probably want to add spaces to every file retroactively in each commit where you edited that file, which would be extremely tedious.

However, there is absolutely nothing wrong with having a commit like this. A commit represents a change a distinct functioning state of your project, and replacing tabs with spaces is definitely a distinct state.

One place where you would want to use rebase is if you accidentally make a non-functional commit. For example, you might have committed only half the files you need to.

One last thing: never edit history (i.e. with rebase) once you've pushed your changes to another machine. The machines will get out of sync, and your repo will start slowly exploding.

Answer 2

Unfortunately there is no way around the fact that at the textual level, this is a big change. The best you can do is not mix whitespace changes with any other changes. The topic of a such a commit should be nothing but the whitespace change.

If this screwup is unpublished (only in your private repos), you can go back in time and fix the mess in that point in the history when it was introduced, and then go through the pain of fixing up the subsequent changes (which have to be re-worked in the correct indentation style). For the effort, you end up with a clean history.