That seems to be a protection from hand-edited (or with hosting panels) configuration.php files that could have a space or extra newline at the end. Removing those could potentially break millions of websites, disallowing headers outputs ?

IMO it's a false protection, as it's possible to edit any number of files through a hosting panel. If that's the reasoning, we should probably buffer every single include / require.

Please don't remove this !

The reason for the output buffering here is to prevent a configuration.php including a BOM (main culprit being the windows notepad), which has been a HUGE support problem in the past.
There are countless threads about this in the support forums.

The original commit (can't find it ATM) included a comment explaining the reason of this strange piece of code.

I believe removing it now will break a lot of sites...

I would highly recommend that this be thoroughly documented in the code to prevent its removal in the future. On the surface, it seems like safe change, but there seems to be a good reason for it and that isn't apparent with // Pre-Load configuration.

Commit which introduced it: 8edfc0c
Tracker was: http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/joomla/tracker/?action=TrackerItemEdit&tracker_item_id=26026

And I agree with Matt that a comment in code would be helpful here.

git-svn actually works... thanks @Bakual

I agree that a "native" english (wo)man should find some wise words about wtf is going on and so prevent the removal of those precious lines of code

OK It's clear this is needed. But I'd definitely agree a clear comment is needed. I'm not 100% on what's exactly the reason for it but would be very much appreciated if someone could add something!

A comment stating "don't remove due to BOM issues, see JCode 26026" would work.

PR at #3404