normalizing files and old revisions

[Andreas Klauer]

Hello,

in order to get rid of whitespace problems (tabs<->spaces, trailing spaces, 
CRLF(\r\n)<->LF(\n)  linefeeds) I want to add a filter to CVSROOT/commitinfo, 
which normalizes (modifies) the corresponding files before they are commited. 
Can anyone confirm that this is the way to go? I got this solution from the 
cvsIndent project, which reformats whole files when commited. Is there a 
better one?

Now, to my main problem:
The repository already contains files which use tabs, CRLF, et cetera. 
Corresponding diffs to old revisions already contain loads of unnecessary 
whitespace changes. I'd like to get rid of these diffs, to make comparisons 
between never revisions (which use filter) and older revisions (which didn't 
have the filter) possible without getting all this whitespace changes junk.

Is it possible somehow to rebuild the repository, to apply this normalizer to 
old revisions, without influencing commit dates, authors, log entrys, 
statistics, so that the resulting repository looks like as if the normalizer 
script was used from the very beginning? I want to make this change 
completely silently.

I suppose that this is not quite in the CVS spirit, because this way old 
revisions can't be restored the way they really were. However, I have backups 
of the repository so that isn't a problem, and it's highly unlikely that 
whitespace changes will affect anything anyway. I'd really prefer to have 
clean diffs. And I can't use diff's 'ignore whitespace'-option, because the 
normalizer script probably will do other things too (like conversion of 
charsets, german umlauts, ...)

Any hints on how to do this?

TIA,
Andreas Klauer