git merge ignoring whitespace

Junio, on 3/25/07 you said:

  I know Linus does not like applying patches with whitespace
  fuzziness, but I personally think a merge that ignores
  whitespace changes would be a useful thing to have, without
  having to call an external specialized merge backend. In other
  words, I do not think it is so special a thing to want to, but
  it is rather an unfortunate norm.  I am not opposed to give
  git-merge-recursive a command line option to tell it to merge
  ignoring the whitespace-only changes, when it does the 3-way
  file-level merge internally.

Whatever came of this?  I tried giving git merge a --ignore-whitespace
argument and the error message that followed show no equivalent
argument.

It would sure come in handy right now.  Is there some other way to do
it that I didn't find searching the mailing list?

Thanks.

Kevin