[MERGE] whitespace normalization

[Andrew Bennetts]

Robert Collins wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-07-25 at 12:02 +1000, Andrew Bennetts wrote:
[...]
> > You're presupposing that a solution is required, i.e. that the current state is
> > a problem.  I'm not convinced that this is the case.  The current high rate of
> > changes is evidence that it isn't problem.
> 
> Its not evidence that its not a problem; its just evidence that some
> fraction (perhaps 100%) of contributors are getting past it.

Yeah, I should have said “weak evidence” perhaps.  The evidence that there is a
problem worth fixing still seems to be missing entirely, though.

Perhaps we're just blessed with contributors with well-behaved text editors? :)

That said I don't care very strongly either way, I'm just a bit puzzled by the
enthusiasm to fix an apparent non-problem.  I'm probably just missing something
that's obvious to other people.

> Its possible to do an automerge of the proposed branch against
> everything in BB and see how much fail we'd get :). I think that that
> would be interesting and give an assessment for how risky this branch
> is.

That would be interesting.  Out of curiousity, I tried a branch I'm currently
working on and got 4 conflicting files.

If we do decide to land a change like this, we probably want to do it right at
the start of a release cycle.

-Andrew.