On Wed, Oct 21, 2026 at 03:52:04PM -0600, Karl Berry wrote: > Hi Gavin - sorry if you've already answered this, but I wonder if you > might be willing to delete the trailing whitespace in texinfo.tex. It > seems the gnulib maintainers now require this (texinfo.tex used to be an > exception, afaik), so the result is that texinfo.tex in gnulib is > now different than upstream. Which doesn't seem good. > > I started this in the 1980s when I first started working on texinfo.tex, > because trailing whitespace made editing easier for me. Sorry that you > inherited the situation. --thanks, karl. >
The main reason not to make a commit removing trailing whitespace is that "git blame texinfo.tex" would have random lines with my name next to them with a newer date. This obscures the history of some parts of the code - although the information is still accessible (with further git commands), sometimes people would give up at that point. I feel like the trailing whitespace in the file is not a problem. I don't understand what is going in gnulib that would make this a problem. (I used to introduce trailing space myself when editing in Vim because I used a setting that meant a line with a trailing space was part of a reflowable block of text - I don't use Vim any more, though.)
