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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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Automating Your Source Code Formatting 3 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • VCS'es should be able to ignore whitespace changes during annotate. Of course, this won't solve all the problems with the "code ownership" in the annotate, but at the very least, changes in indentation won't cause lies about who wrote the code.
    --
    All that is gold does not glitter...

    • That means they would need to know which whitespace is insignificatn and which isn't (Python should be fun). For example:

      - print <<    END;
      + print <<END;

      You're allowed to have leading space before a heredoc identifier. However, without quotes, Perl get's really confused. There are plenty of other cases where whitespace is important when it seems like it shouldn't be. Plus, what do you do if changes to a file are whitespace only? Pretend there was no commit?

      I sympathize with

      • There is, of course, no silver bullet :-) Of the systems I've used, only Git currently supports ignoring whitespace changes when doing annotation. Most of the systems I know can ignore whitespace changes when doing an explicit diff between files or commits (or have the ability to call an external diff program), but not when annotating.

        But even this limited support could amend the scenario you sketched above with:

        You:
        Oh, hm. Let's see if there were only whitespace changes which obscured the original author (or someone who actually changed the code).
        Which makes the "$vcs blame" a lot less useless.
        --
        All that is gold does not glitter...
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