description is getting modified when tagging bugs

The issue seems to be a few things:

1) LP strips trailing spaces and duplicate empty lines when displaying the description, but not when producing the textarea in the "Edit description" page's form.
2) p-lp-b uses the displayed description, not the description from the (other page's) form.
3) p-lp-b does not "know" that its description hasn't been changed, and overwrites the form's description with its internal string in all situations, rather than maintaining some kind "dirty" flag to know when to overwrite the form's description.

#1 is likely not fixable in near-term
#2 is correct if we optimize for speed (though perhaps requests for the description _should_ go fetch it from the form?)
#3 should be fixable, and seems like a reasonable compromise: dropping trailing spaces and dup blanks on an update -- but only when the description actually changes.

Good point, although in my opinion this is more a bug in launchpad. launchpad automatically removes spaces from the last line, why not removing trailing spaces from all lines?

@Kees: I agree with you, except the fact that py-lp-bugs does know what changed, it is in bug.changed.

As a solution I propose:
 * using the description parsed from the bugreport in almost all cases
 * if tags, summary or nickname were changed, but not description, parse the "Edit description" page's form while the 'commit'-process and use this as description in the http-request
 * if description was changed by the user anyway IMHO it is not a problem removing all trailing spaces and duplicate empty lines

What do you think?

Markus

Yeah, I think that would be ideal. :)

This patch against py-lp-bugs' .main branch r44 changes the process as described in comment #2.

Markus

Markus: thanks a lot! Uploaded.