git-fix-whitespace series 0: GitPython vs libgit2

This is the first post of the git-fix-whitespace series. In this series, I will put some notes about working on the project - https://github.com/mrkschan/git-fix-whitespace. (NOTE: This series is a by-product of the git-fix-whitespace project, since my blog need some updates :P)

First of all, let me introduce the rationale of working on this git-fix-whitespace project. Most of the time, as a Python developer, I hate tab indentation and trailing whitespaces (read pep8). I know there are existing tools to "proof-read" a file using certain whitespacing rules. However, I insist to create my own tool to achieve the goal. Reason: I just wanna have a pet project that I LOVE to keep working on.

The very first requirement of this project is to support the configuration directives of git (see `man git-config` and look for `core.whitespace`). Hence, I need to find a tool that can read the git configuration files (both the user level git config file ~/.gitconfig and repository level git config file /.git/config). By using Google, I got GitPython and libgit2/pygit2. At first, I try to read the libgit2 python binding to see if I can read whitespace configuration by simple api calls. But it seems that it did not support that yet (as of 2012-Jan-15). Then I move on to GitPython. Gotcha! There's simple api call to read the core.whitespace configurations :) As a result, git-fix-whitespace got a dependency on GitPython at the moment.