[MPlayer-dev-eng] Trailing whitespace removal and precommit hooks

[Roberto Togni]

On Sun, 04 Feb 2007 20:13:58 +0100
Diego Biurrun <diego at biurrun.de> wrote:

[...]
> 
> Removing all trailing whitespace and then not adding a pre-commit script
> is rather pointless as it will quickly get added back.  I'm speaking
> from experience here as I was the person who removed all trailing
> whitespace and tabs from FFmpeg.  When I installed pre-commit script
> afterwards, quite a few tabs and trailing whitespace had snuck into the
> sources again.

You're missing the point here. I don't consider trailing whitespaces an
annoyance, and I'm not in favor of removing them.
I said that I can accept a one-time patch to remove spaces from empty
lines, but even if such cleanup is done I'm against a rule that forbids
them (and so obviously also against a script that prevents them to be
committed).

> 
> Mechanical checks may be an annoyance but they are there to protect
> against one's own stupidity.  It's like a regression test, it's there to
> catch mistakes ...
> 

If you can write a pre-commit script to prevent stupidity (like 10l
bugs, compilation breakage and such) I'm ok with it. If it fixes the
bugs it's even better :)
But something that reacts on non-mandatory cosmetics is just useless
and annoying.

Ciao,
 Roberto