Conflicts on whitespace suck
Whitespace has ended up being a horrible pain for me while using git.
git config apply.whitespace=strip
seems to highten your chances of getting conflicts (as you strip unneeded whitespace and then other collaborators see the stripped whitespace as a change to their commits?)
I've tried a few other configurations for apply.whitespace in the
past, and maybe one of the other configs solves this, or maybe there's
other settings to deal with whitespace that I just haven't come
across, but I haven't yet found a clear way to get where I want to be.
I want to silently resolve whitespace conflicts:
I never want to have another conflict on whitespace. If another committer alters whitespace, or I alter whitespace and then have to merge against my own conflicts, i really don't want to know about it. If someone changes my code from K&R style to One True Brace style by changing whitespace, I'd prefer git allow either whitespace setup to win out over having to see conflicts about it. I just don't care enough about whitespace to want to see conflicts about it.
So... ...is there any way that I can configure git to do that?
If it makes any difference, here's my git version, and my current config:
tchalvak:~/ninjawars$ git --version
git version 1.6.0.4
tchalvak:~/ninjawars$
git config --list
color.branch=auto
color.diff=auto
color.status=auto
color.branch.current=yellow reverse
color.branch.local=yellow
color.branch.remote=green
color.diff.meta=yellow bold
color.diff.frag=magenta bold
color.diff.old=red bold
color.diff.new=green bold
color.status.added=yellow
color.status.changed=green
color.status.untracked=cyan
gui.recentrepo=/home/tchalvak/zd/htdocs/cms
apply.whitespace=strip
user.name=****
user.email=****
alias.co=checkout
github.user=tchalvak
github.token=****
core.repositoryformatversion=0
core.filemode=true
core.bare=false
core.logallrefupdates=true
[email protected]:tchalvak/ninjawars.git
remote.origin.fetch=+refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
branch.master.remote=origin
branch.master.merge=refs/heads/master
Answer
Git1.6.0.4 seems a bit old, especially if you consider that:
- in 1.6.3.4, "
git apply --whitespace=fix" did not fix trailing whitespace on an incomplete line - in 1.6.3.2, "
whitespace" attribute that is set was meant to detect all errors known to git, but it told git to ignore trailing carriage-returns.
Could you try with Git1.6.4.1, and rather than setting a global config, set an attribute on the files you want a special whitespace handle, like this patch describes.
In a given directory, create a .gitattributes file.
* -whitespace
which will ignore any 'whitespace' errors.
Now that will not prevent any conflict due to lack of consistency but that may be worth trying.
The patch was a test about:
Only ignore whitespace errors in
t/tNNNN-*.shand thet/tNNNNsubdirectories.
Other files (like test libraries) should still be checked.
t/.gitattributes
t[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]-*.sh -whitespace
t[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]/* -whitespace
Note (Git 2.3.2+, Q1 2015, commit 0a80bc9, by Junio C Hamano aka gitster) "git apply --whitespace=fix" is no longer silent:
"
git apply --whitespace=fix" fixed whitespace errors in the common context lines but did so without reporting.When the incoming patch has whitespace errors in a common context line (i.e. a line that is expected to be found and is not modified by the patch), "
apply --whitespace=fix" corrects the whitespace errors the line has, in addition to the whitespace error on a line that is updated by the patch.
However, we did not count and report that we fixed whitespace errors on such lines.