Will text be lost by over extending the right column boundary?

[Tom Bullock]

Developers,

In working on making a patch, I use gedit as my text editor and set the 
right column boundary to 80.  Because I wrote some of my patch without 
regard to the boundary, I found that when I inserted it into the module, 
there was much that overflowed that boundary.

I then changed each line so that it stayed within that boundary.  When I 
created my patch I saw some lines that overflowed that boundary, if only 
by just one or two characters.  That was because the svn diff process 
inserts plus and minus characters and a couple separating spaces on the 
left margin and shifts all to the right.

My question is what latitude is there in paying attention to that right 
boundary?  Will any characters being listed in columns 81 and after be 
dropped?  If not, how much latitude is there in the system?  What do 
experienced patch writers use?

TIA for all help.

Tom