Comment parsing of config_initialize.txt does not allow #-preceding whitespace.

[awwad]

If I correctly understand, then if a line in config_initialize.txt (the dependencies specification for a build) is intended as a comment, but the # is not the very first character (e.g. if the comment line is indented), it will not be properly recognized as a comment line and may be parsed incorrectly. It would fall through this check: https://github.com/SeattleTestbed/buildscripts/blob/master/initialize.py#L73
If we want to avoid that issue, we can simply do this instead of the existing line:

  if line.strip().startswith("#") or line.strip() == '':

[awwad]

Yup. If there's a comment line starting with whitespace in config_initialize.txt, then initialize.py will behave badly (e.g. git clone ... # etc etc), resulting in Git error messages.

[aaaaalbert]

We indeed designed the scripts to only take full-line comments, and the comment line must start with the hash sign. Part of the rationale is that branch names etc. might include hash signs, e.g. fix-argparse-#170, and we didn't want to consider and write tests for potentially dozens of edge cases.

However, 👍 for actually trying it out.

[awwad]

Such things would be unaffected. It's only preceding whitespace that would be stripped - any line that does not have # as its first non-whitespace character would be treated as a non-comment.

[aaaaalbert]

Right. My point is that this bug report concerns a subset of features we chose not to implement. While #9 implements that sub-feature en passant, I would not necessarily advertise this as a new feature for its own sake.