Re: Merge, rebase and whitespace fixes

[Rogan Dawes <lists@dawes.za.net>]

Giuseppe Bilotta wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 11:30 PM, Rogan Dawes<lists@dawes.za.net> wrote:
>> Giuseppe Bilotta wrote:
>>> Hello all,
>>>
>>> recently a tree I've been working on received some thorough whitespace
>>> adjustments (changing indents from spaces to tabs). This results in
>>> annoying conflicts when running merges or rebases with my local
>>> branches. I tried googling around but I couldn't find any helpful
>>> hints on how to make git cope with this. Any suggestions?
>>>
>> Do the same thing to your own tree?
> 
> I tried doing the whitespace cleanup on top of the last patch, but the
> merge still conflicted.
> 
> The interesting thing is that there's patchset from Robert Fitzsimons
> that goes back to August 2005 (!) that does a couple of git apply
> cleanups and in particular adds the --ignore-whitespace option that I
> would need ...
> 
> http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/7876
> 
> but the patch apparently never made it into mainline ...
> 

One thing I have done in the past when trying to merge two diverged
trees was to format each commit in each tree to a common standard.

One of the ways in which the trees had diverged was whitespace
(non-meaningful) changes, so I used the Eclipse formatter as part of a
"git filter-branch" script to make sure that I was ony looking at
meaningful changes between the trees at each point. This significantly
simplified the process.

Rogan