[python-committers] Deny nonbreaking spaces in the precommit script?

[Antoine Pitrou]

> Automation always pays off. Simplifying the process always pays off. 
> Providing yet another step to the workflow would be a move in the 
> opposite direction*. Is there any point in weighing each time whether a 
> mistake is common enough to be included in the commit hooks? It's not 
> like we're paying some SVN vendor a fee per hook ;-)

No, but it's not like the hooks appear by telepathy either. Someone has
to write them and to maintain them. I'm not sure who that is currently
(Martin is a safe guess ;-)) but, regardless, it's not "free" in terms
of maintenance overhead.

I personally don't care whether we deny non-breaking spaces or not. I
see no reason to deny them, since the cause of the test_trace failure
was ultimately a bug in the trace module, and the non-breaking space
actually uncovered this bug (isn't uncovering bugs a good thing?). The
interpreter has no problem with utf-8 characters in source files, and I
guess most humans have no problems reading non-breaking spaces either.

Regards

Antoine.