Whitespace and git pre-commit hook

[leamas]

Currently looking into #1118. The line endings have landed, next step is overall whitespace: trailing whitespace, blank before tab. These things are bad for many reasons.

Fixing current problems is not hard. The issue is how to avoid them in the future.

The best solution would be to add a git pre-commit hook. This will check things when they are committed, and bail out out whitespace errors. This way we can avoid these errors before they merged into the repo.

Actually, this is exactly what the default sample pre-commit hook does. So, to activate this hook devs need to do:

  $ cd .git/hooks
  $ mv pre-commit.sample pre-commit

On Windows, the corresponding command is rename pre-commit.sample pre-commit.

Is this something we could all do, combined with a policy to not accept any PR which have whitespace errors?

[bdbcat]

I see no reason why not. This will fix things certainly for the main contributors. Only a few folks have OCPN push/merge permissions, anyway.
How can we check new PRs automatically, for those devs who have not gotten the message about pre-commit checking?

[leamas]

I'm trying to make a "semi-automatical" script for this purpose. PR under way...

[leamas]

The last PR #2230 contained a script check-pr. It is aimed to be helpful when validating whitespace in pending PRs. Please file bugs against it if required.

[leamas]

From now on I understand that @bdbcat intends to refuse merging PRs with whitespace errors. To avoid such hassles, the recommendation is that other devs enables the standard git pre-commit hook which flags errors before the are committed.