[Reportbug-maint] [reportbug] r538 - in /trunk: ./ debian/changelog reportbug.py

[Ben Finney]

"Chris Lawrence" <lawrencc at debian.org> writes:

> I read that as "Ben doesn't use dch" not "Ben doesn't think trailing
> whitespaces need to be removed when using dch."

Yes, that's right.

> I don't use dch (much) either; I just pull up Emacs and use
> debian-changelog-mode 99.7% of the time.

Same here. My existing editor is being used to edit just about every
other file in the project, and it handles Debian's changelog formats
very well. So, I use its feature of stripping trailing whitespace from
the file.

Special-casing that feature to preserve the trailing whitespace in
existing changelog entries seems pointless.

> While the spaces probably compress out in the grand scheme of
> things, it doesn't seem all that harmful for them to disappear from
> the old entries to maintain consistent formatting in the changelog;
> after all, once upon a time it got converted from Latin1 to UTF-8,
> and that was arguably a more far-reaching change to "old" entries.
> And at this point reverting the change would be just silly.

Okay. My proposal, then: At some future point, I'll make another
commit to Subversion trunk that removes all trailing whitespace from
all changelog entries, and does nothing else (to minimise changeset
noise).

-- 
 \        "Intellectual property is to the 21st century what the slave |
  `\                              trade was to the 16th." —David Mertz |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney