Question

I’ve got a problem, where a large commit which changes about a thousand lines of code, removing whitespace from the end of lines and removing spaces before tabs.

There are also about 50 pull requests for this project, in which all will get conflicts, when my commit is merged. Is there any way that git can be set up so that when merging future commits, it ignores conflicts where one of them is just a whitespace change?

Modifying git itself or using a third party tool isn’t possible, but using a hook is fine.

Answer 1

 git merge -Xignore-all-space

Or (more precise)

 git merge -Xignore-space-change

should be enough to ignore all space related conflicts during the merge.

See git diff:

--ignore-space-change

Ignore changes in amount of whitespace.
This ignores whitespace at line end, and considers all other sequences of one or more whitespace characters to be equivalent.

--ignore-all-space

Ignore whitespace when comparing lines.
This ignores differences even if one line has whitespace where the other line has none.

ks1322 adds in the comments a good advice:

It is worth to merge with --no-commit and review the merge before actual commit.

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The OP Callum Macrae reports that, in that case, the merge proceed uninterrupted, and the trailing spaces contained in the pull request patches are applied to the local files.
However, the OP uses a pre-commit hook which takes care of said trailing spaces.
(I suppose a bit similar to this one, also referenced here).

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The OP’s pre-commit hook is referenced here:

In addition to removing trailing whitespace, it removes one to three spaces before tabs (I have tab width set to 4), and adds EOLs.
I’ve had reports that the code that adds the EOL deletes the file in windows, but haven’t been able to replicate it.