Re: Checking in files with trailing white space

[Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>]

On 12/13/2016 11:00 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> Producing arbitrary output from a text description might not be easy.

It might not be; but ordinarily it is, for the test data that Emacs needs.

> I'm not sure this is relevant here. E.g., we distribute Emacs sources
> as a compressed archive, not as a set of plain-text files.

That is merely an issue of efficient data transfer. We use a convenient 
format (compressed tarball) that is universally understood to stand for 
a set of source files, and it's OK to do that.

It would become not-OK if we had a complicated or error-prone procedure 
for deriving the source code, or expected people to reverse-engineer 
object code within the tarball. It's common practice for closed-source 
software developers to do that sort of thing. For example, they may 
purposely obscure the source code, and ship object files (in the GPL 
sense) that they call "source files" (because you can feed them to a 
compiler). Although we are obviously not doing that here, we should 
avoid even a whiff of doing so, so as to set a good example.