git: change styling (whitespace) without changing ownership/blame?

Question

We have a massive, ancient codebase that needs a lot of cleanup. We have always had coding standards and everyone has always tried to follow them, but they were not enforced

Answer 1

In an ideal world there would be some way to rewrite history to look like the violations were never introduced

git filter-branch does precisely that.

http://git-scm.com/docs/git-filter-branch

This has the same issues as all history rewriting commands do, as it essentially invalidates all cloned repositories.