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[Tim Harig]

On 2010-11-04, Grant Edwards <invalid at invalid.invalid> wrote:
> On 2010-11-04, Seebs <usenet-nospam at seebs.net> wrote:
>> On 2010-11-04, D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy at druid.net> wrote:
>>> Right.  If you mangle spaces in Python or mangle braces in C then
>>> recovery becomes impossible.  I don't think anyone is contesting that.
>>> What we question is the idea that somehow Python is special in this
>>> regard.  If you move files around in ways that change them then your
>>> tools are broken.  The fact that the breakage is somewhat "friendlier"
>>> to some types of files is interesting but irrelevant.
>>
>> Again, why does "diff -b" exist?
>>
>> It exists because so many things change whitespace unintentionally that
>> it's a common failure mode.
>
> It exists because so many people change whitespace intentionally in C
> source code because no two C programmers seem able to agree on how to
> format code.  Diff -b allows you to attempt to ignore semantically
> null stylistic changes made by programmers.

I have seen huge patches caused by nothing more then some edit that
accidently added a trailing space to a large number of lines.  White space
mangling happens all the time without people even knowing about it.