git apply : error trailing whitespace

Question

Lately, I've been playing a little bit with git. I'm trying to simulate to apply a patch to my master branch, this patch comprehends a commit where I added some comments to a java operation. I generated the patch using git format-patch. Then I switched to my master branch to apply the patch. the following errors occurred when executing the git apply command :

path/to/my/patch/file: line x
path/to/my/patch/file: line x+1
path/to/my/patch/file: line x+2
path/to/my/patch/file: line x+3

I note that I also tried the following arguments : --ignore-space, ignore-whitespace,

Solution

If you are not concerned with applying trailing whitespaces to your repo you can use the flag --whitespace=fix to ignore the error and apply anyway

git apply --whitespace=fix your.patch

I have heard some people say that the default is to warn and apply the patch, but that has not been my experience and the above solution seems to do what I want.