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

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

On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 16:51, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason  <avarab@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Change git-am to ignore whitespace (as defined by sh's read) at the
>> beginning of patches.
>>
>> Empty lines are wont to creep in at the beginning of patches, here's
>> an example from a raw Gmail attachment:
>>
>>     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|
>>
>> Whitespace is also likely to appear if the user copy/pastes the patch
>> around, e.g. via a pastebin, or any any number of other cases. This
>> harms nothing and makes git-am's detection more fault tolerant.
>
> Actually cut-and-paste is often a major source of whitespace breakage
> (including tabs silently being expanded), and I personally think a patch
> like this to encourage the practice is going in a wrong direction.

It doesn't encourage that copy/paste. It's just tangentally mentioned
in the commit message since it's a plausable use case.

What it does is enable the GMail -> download -> git-am workflow. GMail
(and doubtless countless other) E-Mail providers introduce whitespace
at the beginning of raw E-Mail messages, while otherwise leaving them
intact.