I’ve had something strange occur when attempting to commit changes to a Git repository located on a flash drive. A pre-commit hook, which is a script Git runs before the git commit command does its thing, prevents me from committing files until I’ve removed whitespace characters from the ends of all the lines in the files. Cleaning out such whitespace is good practice if you’re working on a project and you submit your changes as patches; the patch mechanism has a tendency to barf on lines that contain trailing whitespace.

My problem is that not only am I not working on a project where I submit patches, some of the Rails generators create files that contain trailing whitespace (I’m looking at you, RSpec). When I found that the rake db:migrate task adds trailing whitespace to the schema.rb file, I nearly went ballistic. I’d be okay with keeping the whitespace out of my own code, because I’m just OCD enough to enjoy the exercise, but having to fix code generated by automation tools just pisses me off.

Originally published at nyerm. You can comment here or there.