Bug#177523: trailing whitespace (Re: Bug#177523: reopen)
On Sat, Oct 21, 2006 at 12:31:12AM +0800, Dan Jacobson wrote:
> J> This should really be a bug against individual packages; it doesn't make sense
> J> to include it in policy (its obviously not ideal to include trailing
> J> whitespace), or devref (people writing syslog code won't think to look there,
> J> and it clutters the "Debian practices" content), or aging in the BTS. Dan,
> J> what are the relevant packages? Have you cloned this bug against them yet?
>
> All I know is almost any package where the author doesn't have e.g.,
> show-trailing-whitespace turned on all day in emacs will have trailing
> whitespace. Check with grep -c ' $', or better, pcregrep -c '\s$' on
> all the non-binary files in the package. So I was hoping there was a
> central place to mention it.
If you want this to get fixed, you need to make a specific suggestion.
> Here I pick some place on Debian at random, and sure enough:
> $ cd /usr/share/doc
> $ find mencoder/ -type f|xargs zgrep -c \ $
> mencoder/copyright:0
> mencoder/examples/codecs.conf.gz:10
> mencoder/README.Debian.gz:24
> mencoder/changelog.gz:0
> mencoder/changelog.Debian.gz:2
These are all (except codecs.conf.gz) Debian files, and it would be appropriate
for lintian to check for them. However, when you submitted a bug against
lintian, it was apparently to "check program source code to make sure that it
doesn't create any syslog entries with trailing whitespace".
These are two separate issues, both of which might warrent bug reports. The
"logfiles" bug, however, should be submitted against the individual packages,
since there is no conceivable way for lintian (or such) to check for it,
whereas the "Debian files" bug might reasonably be implemented in such a tool.
Justin
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