[MERGE] whitespace normalization

[Aaron Bentley]

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Ben Finney wrote:
>> Do you have any evidence that this has happened to people working on
>> bzr?
> 
> I'm not sure how I would have that evidence, as I don't interact with
> the Bazaar code base. My argument was made on the basis that such
> spurious conflicts are caused by such whitespace changes between
> different users, regardless of whether they're done all in one go or
> dispersed over the history of the code base.

You're assuming that the same change would be made whether we do it all
in one go, or later.  But actually, we try to improve the codebase
gradually.  If a line has trailing whitespace, we wait until we need to
change the line anyhow, and then strip the trailing whitespace at the
same time.

And of course, some non-spurious changes are deletions, which will kill
any inappropriate whitespace in the deleted region at the same time.

So *when* we make the changes actually does affect the nature of the
changes.  And this approach ensures that no change is *spurious*.

I wrote cdiff's --check-syntax feature with this approach in mind, and I
have also configured my editor to help spot these things.

Aaron
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