Whitespace cleanups

[Ken Thomases]

On Nov 25, 2009, at 11:13 AM, Nate Gallaher wrote:

> Ken Thomases wrote:
>> One important reason to avoid whitespace-only changes is it makes git-blame essentially useless for finding the real source of functional changes.
>> 
> 
> But is that really important?  git-bisect would put you on the other side of any whitespace changes, and a prudent bug-hunter should be referring to the commit logs anyway.

Who says git-blame is only useful on occasions when it makes sense to git-bisect?  Or that one is hunting bugs.

I often use git-blame precisely to figure out which commit log I need to be looking at to understand why the code is the way it is.  I see something in the code which is done in a way I don't understand/expect.  I git-blame to see what commit introduced the code in that form.  I get a commit ID.  I look up the commit to see what it contained, what the log message was, what commits were around it, etc.

How would git-bisect be helpful in that case?

> There should be a path to eventual codebase sanity, no matter how slow.

I think you're going to be disappointed.  :-/

-Ken