[sldev] Patchy whitespace

[Melinda Green]

I think that could help developers who don't have complete control of 
how their editors handle whitespace, but it doesn't help with the 
problem of rectifying inconsistent whitespace in the code base. I 
suppose we could blindly run a good pretty-printer on all the code but 
it almost certainly wouldn't do a perfect job (especially with comments) 
and would carry other costs and risks. Weather or not it'd be worth the 
costs would depend upon the state of the art which I don't currently know.

-Melinda

Ricky wrote:
> I've been seeing a bit of discussion on the handling of whitespace in 
> the diffs...  Would patch's -l (lowercase L) flag be helpful?  Or 
> would it hinder by hiding some other issue?
>
> Here's the relevant section from the man page:
>       -l  or  --ignore-whitespace
>           Match patterns loosely, in case tabs or spaces have been 
> munged in your files.  Any sequence of one or more  blanks  in  the  patch
>           file  matches  any sequence in the original file, and 
> sequences of blanks at the ends of lines are ignored.  Normal 
> characters must
>           still match exactly.  Each line of the context must still 
> match a line in the original file.
>
> Ricky
> aka Cron Stardust