Gavin Smith <[email protected]> writes:
> On Wed, Oct 21, 2026 at 03:52:04PM -0600, Karl Berry wrote:
>> Hi Gavin - sorry if you've already answered this, but I wonder if you
>> might be willing to delete the trailing whitespace in texinfo.tex. It
>> seems the gnulib maintainers now require this (texinfo.tex used to be an
>> exception, afaik), so the result is that texinfo.tex in gnulib is
>> now different than upstream. Which doesn't seem good.
>>
>> I started this in the 1980s when I first started working on texinfo.tex,
>> because trailing whitespace made editing easier for me. Sorry that you
>> inherited the situation. --thanks, karl.
>>
>
> The main reason not to make a commit removing trailing whitespace is that
> "git blame texinfo.tex" would have random lines with my name next to them
> with a newer date. This obscures the history of some parts of the code -
> although the information is still accessible (with further git commands),
> sometimes people would give up at that point.
There is a file named .git-blame-ignore-revs where you can list commits
like this, which solves at least some of the problem. I've never used
it, though, so I'm not sure if there are edge cases it cannot properly
handle.
> I feel like the trailing whitespace in the file is not a problem. I don't
> understand what is going in gnulib that would make this a problem.
>
> (I used to introduce trailing space myself when editing in Vim because I used
> a setting that meant a line with a trailing space was part of a reflowable
> block of text - I don't use Vim any more, though.)
Karl, does this break your script copying texinfo.tex or something? In
Gnulib's .gitattributes file we have this:
# Don't check some specific files against trailing whitespace.
doc/Copyright/* -text
tests/unigbrk/GraphemeBreakTest.txt -text
tests/unilbrk/LineBreakTest.txt -text
tests/uniwbrk/WordBreakTest.txt -text
If so, maybe adding texinfo.tex here will resolve those issues?
Collin
