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Linus and whitespace

DISCUSSION [email protected] 4 participants 4 messages Jun 15, 2016

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#0 lore raw

Gentlemen, I couldn't help but notice a certain Linus B. Torvalds is producing mail with trailing whitespace.

I recall one should (linux-doc-*/Documentation/CodingStyle*:) "Get a decent editor and don't leave whitespace at the end of lines."

Indeed, with my GNU Emacs show-trailing-whitespace X-ray eyespecs on all day, whitespace becomes screaming purple space, so you can't blame me for noticing.

Anyway, I have analyzed his messages,
(User-Agent: Alpine 2.00 (LFD 1167 2008-08-23))
and discovered that the whitespace phenomenon almost always occurs if the lines are more than 60 characters long, the "danger zone", we might say.

$ perl -nwle 'print length if / $/' recent_linus_postings|
sort|uniq -c|sort -k 2nr
      1 77
      1 76
     17 75
     17 74
     11 73
     18 72
     12 71
      6 70
      8 69
      6 68
      2 67
      1 66
      2 64
      1 63
      1 40
      9 2
#1 lore raw
Quoted 25 lines · [email protected] wrote:

Gentlemen, I couldn't help but notice a certain Linus B. Torvalds is producing mail with trailing whitespace.

I recall one should (linux-doc-*/Documentation/CodingStyle*:) "Get a decent editor and don't leave whitespace at the end of lines."

Indeed, with my GNU Emacs show-trailing-whitespace X-ray eyespecs on all day, whitespace becomes screaming purple space, so you can't blame me for noticing.

Anyway, I have analyzed his messages,
(User-Agent: Alpine 2.00 (LFD 1167 2008-08-23))
and discovered that the whitespace phenomenon almost always occurs if the lines are more than 60 characters long, the "danger zone", we might say.

$ perl -nwle 'print length if / $/' recent_linus_postings|
sort|uniq -c|sort -k 2nr
      1 77
      1 76
     17 75
     17 74
     11 73
     18 72
     12 71
      6 70
Quoted 8 lines
      8 69
      6 68
      2 67
      1 66
      2 64
      1 63
      1 40
      9 2

CodingStyle applies to *patches* not to discussion. In how many of those emails you analyzed were there any trailing whitespace in a patch?

#2 lore raw
In reply to [email protected]
Quoted 3 lines · On Mon, 2 Feb 2009, [email protected] wrote:

Gentlemen, I couldn't help but notice a certain Linus B. Torvalds is producing mail with trailing whitespace.

alpine does it when word-wrapping my messages.

But I don't word-wrap my _patches_. Those I just insert, and alpine gets it right.

Linus

#3 lore raw
In reply to [email protected]
Quoted 2 lines · On 2009-02-01, [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote:

Gentlemen, I couldn't help but notice a certain Linus B. Torvalds is producing mail with trailing whitespace.

Boy, do you have too much free time on your hands...

Greetings,
Jojo

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Johannes Gilger <[email protected]>
http://hackvalue.de/heipei/
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