Re: [PATCH v2] git-am: Ignore whitespace before patches

["Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason" <avarab@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 22:50, Jon Seymour <jon.seymour@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 5:57 AM, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
> <avarab@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Change git-am to ignore whitespace (as defined by sh's read) at the
>> beginning of patches.
>>
>> This makes git-am work with patches downloaded from the GMail web
>> interface, here's an example from a raw Gmail attachment produced with
>> `hexdump -C':
>>
>>    20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20  20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20  |                |
>>    20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20  20 20 20 20 20 20 20 0a  |               .|
>>    52 65 74 75 72 6e 2d 50  61 74 68 3a 20 3c 61 76  |Return-Path: <av|
>>
>> Having to tell GMail users that they must manually edit their patches
>> before git-am will accept them (as this article does:
>> http://evag.evn.am/git/git-and-gmail) isn't optimal.
>
> This is a good point. Current behaviour discourages testing of patches
> as delivered by e-mail since the GMail user is more likely to overlook
> actual whitespace errors in a patch because they come to expect this
> usual failure.

Just to clarify, git-am doesn't print a whitespace error on GMail
patches currently, the detection just fails:

    $ git am ~/Desktop/mail.txt
    Patch format detection failed.

But with my patch:

    $ git am ~/Desktop/mail.txt
    Applying: git-am: Ignore whitespace before patches