Re: [PATCH] gdb, gdbserver, gdbsupport: fix leading space vs tabs issues

[Simon Marchi <simark@simark.ca>]

On 2020-09-14 12:13 p.m., Simon Marchi via Gdb-patches wrote:
> Many spots incorrectly use only spaces for indentation (for example,
> there are a lot of spots in ada-lang.c).  I've always found it awkward
> when I needed to edit one of these spots: do I keep the original wrong
> indentation, or do I fix it?  What if the lines around it are also
> wrong, do I fix them too?  I probably don't want to fix them in the same
> patch, to avoid adding noise to my patch.
>
> So I propose to fix as much as possible once and for all (hopefully).
>
> One typical counter argument for this is that it makes code archeology
> more difficult, because git-blame will show this commit as the last
> change for these lines.  My counter counter argument is: when
> git-blaming, you often need to do "blame the file at the parent commit"
> anyway, to go past some other refactor that touched the line you are
> interested in, but is not the change you are looking for.  So you
> already need a somewhat efficient way to do this.
>
> Using some interactive tool, rather than plain git-blame, makes this
> trivial.  For example, I use "tig blame <file>", where going back past
> the commit that changed the currently selected line is one keystroke.
> It looks like Magit in Emacs does it too (though I've never used it).
> Web viewers of Github and Gitlab do it too.  My point is that it won't
> really make archeology more difficult.
>
> The other typical counter argument is that it will cause conflicts with
> existing patches.  That's true... but it's a one time cost, and those
> are not conflicts that are difficult to resolve.  I have also tried "git
> rebase --ignore-whitespace", it seems to work well.  Although that will
> re-introduce the faulty indentation, so one needs to take care of fixing
> the indentation in the patch after that (which is easy).
>
> The patch is too big to send through the list, so I have uploaded it on
> the users/simark/fix-leading-whitespace branch:
>
> https://sourceware.org/git/?p=binutils-gdb.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/users/simark/fix-leading-whitespace
>
> Simon
>

I rebased the patch and updated the users/simark/fix-leading-whitespace
branch, I plan on pushing it sometimes this week if there are no
objections.

Simon