Documentation Bug 630652 created to install Guide update for Other Assets

[Yawar Amin]

Hi Tom,

On 2010-10-01, at 08:34, Thomas Bullock wrote:

> Hi Yawar,
> 
>> 
>>> […]
> 
> I get what you are saying here, but that does not answer the question about how whitespace is determined and removed.  Is that built in to Trac and automatically done?  Or does the updater have to identify these thru some laborious process?

Ah, sorry, misunderstood or misread your original question. Let me show you what happens with a (very simple) example. Let’s say we have some original text (I’ll use the underscore character, _, to denote Space characters):

  GnuCash_is_a_personal_accounting_application._It_can_also_be_used_for_small_businesses.

Then someone changes it to:

  GnuCash_is_a_personal_accounting_application.__It_can_also_be_used_for_SMEs._

The output of a diff command will be:

 -GnuCash is a personal accounting application. It can also be used for small businesses.
 +GnuCash is a personal accounting application.  It can also be used for SMEs. 

The extra spaces are still there, but you can only ‘see’ the first one because it shifts the last few words one space to the right. You can’t see the second space character, at the end of the sentence, because it’s a space character–it’s invisible. (You can select it with the mouse, though.)

However, some diffing tools are very helpful in that they show you end-of-sentence space characters with a coloured background. The one I use comes with Git (the version control software) and highlights extra spaces in bright red, so they’re easy for me to find. Here’s a screenshot:
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So in short–yes, I did go through your patch line by line to remove all the extra spaces, and committed the resulting patch into the repository. It was easy because of Git.

OK, you might think, why didn’t Trac show extra spaces in your patch [1]? Because Trac only show extra spaces as compared to what was there before, and since the chapter you wrote was completely new, Trac had nothing to compare it with and know that ‘Oh, these are extra spaces in here–I’ll highlight them in colour’. I guess it’s a limitation. Some people might see it as a bug, others might say it’s not Trac’s job to show those spaces. The people who wrote Git decided that they wanted Git to be able to, and so it does.

>> […]
> 
> Yes, discesses was the spelling mistake I found.  However, the sequence of tenses error is still there, since you did not mention it.
> Please release changes in references [6] and [7].  I will make the suggested patch, a new one, for the sequence of tenses issue.

I’ve gone ahead and pushed these changes into the repository.[2][3] Please do an ‘svn update’ and then start work on your grammar patch. Thanks!

> Thanks again for your attention to all these matters.  It really helps, especially as I have much to get used to.

You’re welcome. And I have to say, you’ve been very patient with all this technical stuff. Thanks and props for that.

[1] http://svn.gnucash.org/trac/changeset/19618
[2] http://svn.gnucash.org/trac/changeset/19628
[3] http://svn.gnucash.org/trac/changeset/19629

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