Re: Checking in files with trailing white space

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Cc: acm@muc.de, larsi@gnus.org, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> From: Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>
> Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2016 23:31:42 -0800
> 
> An example of trouble is test/manual/etags/f-src/entry.strange.gz. Instead of 
> committing the gzipped file, I'd commit the original text file 'entry.strange', 
> and compress a copy as part of the test.

But what about data files that cannot be easily produced from text on
any garden-variety system?

> To see an example problem when binary data is committed, visit this URL:
> 
> http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/commit/?id=6db72771cc08e719a08f56db8abd7cefef9c8c99
> 
> Because that commit installed some Latin-1 text, the body of that web page 
> contains a mixture of UTF-8 and Latin-1.

Sometimes this is necessary.  We could, of course, recode the file
using Emacs, but only in most cases, not all of them.  E.g., producing
a file with invalid bytes might not be easy at all.

And for other use cases, doing what you want might be next to
impossible, except if we write a C or Lisp program to generate the
data, something that might make the job significantly harder than just
grabbing a file.

So I think it would be good to avoid binary data when feasible, but I
won't make that a hard requirement.  We don't want to make the job of
adding tests any harder than it already is.