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Re: Checking in files with trailing white space


From: Paul Eggert
Subject: Re: Checking in files with trailing white space
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2016 10:33:07 -0800
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/45.5.1

On 12/13/2016 08:01 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
what about data files that cannot be easily produced from text on
any garden-variety system?

An Elisp program can easily produce data files in any format, so this should not be a problem in practice.

We don't want to make the job of adding tests any harder than it already is.

We can tolerate low-quality tests, I suppose. But it's better if tests are readable and work well with standard tools like "git diff". So we should encourage replacing binary data with text in the repository, as this will make the tests more maintainable.

This is not merely a practical point; it's also a philosophical one. The GPL distinguishes source code from object code. Typically, binary data files are "object code" in the GPL sense, in that they are not the preferred form of a test case for software-development tools like Git. Whenever we distribute object code, the GPL implies that we should also distribute the corresponding source code that is easy for Git etc. to work with. This source code belongs in the Git repository, and the corresponding object code need not and should not be in the Git repository.




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