[Insight-developers] make git automatically convert tabs to spaces

[Mark Roden]

Hi all,

I learned a neat trick for the tabs/spaces issue I was having earlier.

Turns out Git can be set to scrub all files that go to the repository to
behave by a set of rules, as per this question here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2316677/can-git-automatically-switch-between-spaces-and-tabs

So, on my mac, I did these things:

1) edit .git/info/attributes to be:
*.cxx filter=tabspace
*.txx filter=tabspace
*.h filter=tabspace
*.c filter=tabspace

2) set the tabspace filter to be:
git config --global filter.tabspace.clean 'expand -t 2 '
(this is the mac/bsd version of the command; the version on that SO question
is for a different Linux flavor, I believe)

3) Now when you commit, your tabs will be automatically converted to 2
spaces, thus avoiding that pre-commit hook check.

Potential trouble situations: some characters cause the expand program to
fail.  When piped to 'less', the results are failing at what looks like <BF>
in the command line and an o with a vertical slash through it in XCode.  I
think that expand will only work on char streams, not unicode streams, so so
long as our code is submitted as purely 8-bit chars, this will work.

Hope that helps,
Mark
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