Re: [gentoo-dev] Ebuild indentation (tabs vs. spaces) fascism ;^)

[Bruce A. Locke]

On Sat, 2002-04-27 at 18:17, Arcady Genkin wrote:
> Two questions:
>
> 1. What makes tabbed indentation in ebuilds so much better than
>    indentation with spaces?  I know *plenty* of reasons *against* using
>    tab characters, but I must be missing something obvious, because I
>    know no reasons in favor of tabs.

In any decent editor you can set the number of spaces a tab corresponds
to on the screen.  If tabs in your editor are creating too much
whitespace for your taste on your screen, its configurable.  And because
you used tabs, anyone can tell their editor how many spaces to display
and if they use tabs then its all left up to how the editor displays it.

Also which would you prefer to do:  hit space a few times to make sure
your new line is lined up with the old ones, or hit 
tab once and be done with it.

>
> 2. Even if it turns out tabs are somehow better than spaces, why do
>    we want to be so fascist[1][2] about it?  Why don't we let the ebuild
>    maintainer to decide which approach suits his philosophy, editor and
>    habits?  We can still require that all indents are 4 spaces wide; I'm
>    only talking about tabs/spaces issue.

I used to be anti-tab myself... Then overtime as I started using decent
editors (vim, emacs, etc) I realized how much of a pain space indenting
was and went back and have converted all my old ebuilds to using tabs.

And while we are joking around, whats more fascist... forcing me to deal
with "hardcode" spaces forcing me to have my terminal X columns wide, or
leaving it to the enduser to configure their editor to display it with
the number of spaces they like ;)

-- 

Bruce A. Locke
blocke@××××××.org