[Box Backup] Diff Optimisations now in SVN

[Jonathan Morton]

>> Note that a side-effect of my using KATE is that there are a lot of 
>> deltas referring to blank lines, where KATE has deleted trailing 
>> whitespace characters from the entire file being edited.  I'm not 
>> sure what to do about that, aside from trying to work out the right 
>> GNU indent parameters and hoping nothing else breaks.  Perhaps 
>> someone had better go through all the other trees and delete trailing 
>> whitespace from them too.
>
> I think the best thing to do here is 'diff -uw' your changes and apply 
> that as a patch to a new copy from trunk. Otherwise this is going to 
> cause excessive and unnecessary pain. That's exactly what I did for my 
> merge above, and it worked well.

OK, I just did that (actually, made a plain patch against trunk 
alongside an --ignore-space-change version, reversed the plain one, 
then applied the other).  This seems to have corrected the problem 
cleanly, without affecting the existence blank lines in new code as -w 
would have.

> As to whether to strip trailing spaces, I prefer that. I have emacs 
> set to do that by default, but I turn it off when working on box. KATE 
> must have an option to turn it off too (I'd consider it a bug if not). 
> But either way I don't much care.

It does have the option, but there's no way to put the spaces back in 
after the fact, except by the above laborious patching method.  Since I 
greatly prefer to use KATE than other editors these days (Emacs is OK 
to use, but an utter pain to configure the way I like it), I think 
getting rid of the trailing spaces at *some* point is a good idea.

--------------------------------------------------------------
from:     Jonathan "Chromatix" Morton
mail:     chromi@chromatix.demon.co.uk
website:  http://www.chromatix.uklinux.net/
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