Re: [PATCH] Don't use $author_name undefined when $from contains no /\s</.

Paul Eggert [off-list ref] writes:

Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

I see no good reason, other than saving a single byte from the
output stream perhaps.

That wasn't the motivation.  Rather, it was to support the
style where people use editors that highlight trailing
blanks, since trailing blanks can cause trouble in some
contexts (e.g., they can change the semantics of C programs
and Makefiles).  When examining unified diffs, any added or
removed trailing blanks will be easy to spot with such an
editor, but only if "diff -u" doesn't output any trailing
blanks of its own.

If "trailing space" highlighting picks up the first column blank
in "diff -u" output, that highlighting feature is *broken*.

"git diff --color" does the whitespace breakage highlighting,
but it knows that the first column *is* not payload and does not
highlight it.

You can read more about this at the thread that inspired
the diffutils change, rooted here:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-utils/2006-09/msg00005.html

I've read it.  It was not convincing and was not even an amusing
read.