Re: the war on trailing whitespace

Peter Williams [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

This whitespace policy should be at least per-project (people
working on both kernel and other things may have legitimate
reason to want trailing whitespace in the other project),

I'd be interested to hear these reasons.  My experience is that people
don't put trailing white space in deliberately (or even tolerate it if
they notice it) and it's usually there as a side effect of the way
their text editor works (and that's also the reason that they don't
usually notice it).  But if my experience is misleading me and there
are valid reasons for having trailing white space I'm genuinely
interested in knowing what they are.

For example:

	http://compsoc.dur.ac.uk/whitespace/

Jokes aside, I can imagine people want to keep format=flowed
text messages (i.e. not programming language source code) under
git control.  Maybe pulling and pushing would be the default
mode of operation for those people, so what git-apply does would
not be in the picture for those people, but who knows.

One way to find it out is to push out a strict one and see who
screams ;-), but the point is I am reluctant to make a stricter
policy the default, thinking, but not knowing as a fact, that it
is good enough for everybody.