On Mon, 24 Oct 2011 at 07:54AM -0700, Keshav Kini wrote: > Shouldn't we have mention trailing whitespace somewhere in the developer's > guide - namely telling people to omit it? Having such a policy makes for > cleaner revision control, as most agree (for example, at some point git by > default didn't let you commit changes which include adding trailing > whitespace to files). There are way too many patches on trac with chunks > that just remove trailing whitespace introduced in other patches, IMHO. If > we take some stance on it (much like our official endorsement of PEP 8), > this will be reduced. If people agree I'll make a ticket to add a couple > lines to the developer's guide.
Based on the no-tabs-in-Sage-code experience, the only way to have any kind of actual effect is to add a tool to the merge or doctest scripts so that new trailing whitespace causes an error. (Working on Sage has taught me that only automated tools work; asking people to remember something or behave a certain way always fails. :) It seems like no one wants to have an epic break-all-patches-in-trac patch that removes all the trailing whitespace in the Sage library -- and, some people like some trailing whitespace, so perhaps we should also add just a warning to the sage-merge script (or whatever release managers use to add patches)? Dan -- --- Dan Drake ----- http://mathsci.kaist.ac.kr/~drake -------
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