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Date: Sun, 23 Jun 1996 20:25:54 -0600
From: vjs@mica.denver.sgi.com (Vernon Schryver)
Message-Id: <199606240225.UAA06363@mica.denver.sgi.com>
To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
Subject: Re: Typos in rtquery(8)
Cc: freebsd-current@FreeBSD.org, Ollivier Robert <roberto@keltia.freenix.fr>
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> To: vjs (Vernon Schryver)
> cc: Ollivier Robert <roberto@keltia.freenix.fr>, freebsd-current@FreeBSD.org,
>         wollman@FreeBSD.org
> From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
> 
> > What is the "trailing whitespace issue"?  Some kind of problem with
> > the version of GNU C you use?
> 
> Erm, the less said about this the better. :-)
> 
> Suffice it to say that somebody got the bright idea one day that we
> were wasting all this space in our source tree with useless "trailing
> whitespace" in files and wrote a script to remove it all, not heeding
> the fact that this would generate conflicts forever more when
> importing any new code from the original vendors.


interesting.  Besides breaking or reeducating fingers, you might want
to review that script.

When I make small changes, I use `vi`, but on new code or when making
large changes, I use some emacs lisp stuff that I've been carrying
around since the early 1980's.  One of the things that it does is
delete all trailing whitespace, deletes redundant blanks before tabs,
and converts 2 or more blanks to tabs when it is possible to do that
without changing the visible indentation of the source.  (Of course, it
uses the universal (among the clue-full) assumption of 8 blanks/HT.)
I'm compulsive and/or anal-retentive about using it--only, of course,
on code that I think I personally own, even in the SGI source trees.  I
would be surprised if there are more than 2 or 3 blanks followed by
newlines in all of ~10,000 lines of new routed source.


Vernon Schryver,  vjs@sgi.com