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

[Bruce A. Locke]

On Sat, 2002-04-27 at 23:38, Arcady Genkin wrote:
> > 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.
>
> Just as easily any decent editor can be configured to not use tab
> characters, and insert 4 spaces when you hit TAB once (or to translate
> all tab chars into spaces when saving the file).

Then you just forced the issue.  If you put 4 spaces in, there is no way
to tell my editor to display it as a certain amount of whitespace, with
tabs you can.

Also your assuming everyone uses the same amount of spaces for
everything.  They do not... Some people use 4, some use 2, some use a
random number and I encounter all of them in various ebuilds.  If people
use tabs the matter becomes much simpilier.

Now that this topic has come up I must say I'm frankly tired of playing
the <space><space><space><space><backspace> *hmm... is it lined up* game
instead of <tab> *done* with alot of ebuilds.  I admit to converting any
ebuild I have to heavily modify to tabs out of habit without sometimes
realizing it.

> The advantage of
> using spaces is that it also works well in *any* editor with *default*

If they are using a GUI editor, your assuming they are using a
monospaced font.  If they are not using a monospaced font and using
spaces it will look worse then if you used tabs in alot of cases.

Also there are alot of bad editors out there... I'm sorry but I don't
feel much sympathy for people using notepad, kedit, and many gui editors
;)

> configuration, works with the pagers like "less" or "more", and even
> with "cat".

Could you explain what the problem is here?  I view ebuilds with tabs in
them all the time with no problems.  I can't imagine a case where if
there was an issue it would be important... do you edit your ebuilds
with cat? :)

> Of course, you can, possibly, configure your terminal
> emulator to interpret TAB character as 4 spaces, but that's already
> not trivial to do.

Yes, you can do it, its an option at least.  Spaces don't give you that
option.
 
> I find that I often use emacs and vi interchangeably, depending on the
> task at hand.  Furthermore, sometimes I use them from my usual
> (non-privileged) account, and sometimes---as root.  On top of this, I
> do it on more than one machines, that don't share home directories.
> If the indentation were all-spaces, I could just fire up any editor,
> without thinking twice what machine I'm logged in to, and see the
> ebuild exactly the way it was intended to be seen, as well as be able
> to edit it likewise.  This all goes to hell if using tabs, unless I
> pre-configure my VI, emacsen and terminals for every possible
> combination of machines and accounts.

I don't know about you, but I'm quite happy with the default tab sizes
in vim and emacs... and if for some reason I need to adjust it, its a
single command in vim:

set tabstop=4

This really shines working with real programming languages like C++,
Python, and Java.  Code can get nasty fast and the ability to be able to
set "tabstop=1" at will can make the difference between having half of
it off screen to making it somewhat readable :)  And when I'm done
reading that section I can set it back to 4 or whatever I'm comfortable
with.

> > 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.
>
> Interesting, why was it a pain with good editors?  I have switched to
> using all spaces years ago, when I saw what a piece of my tabbed code
> looked like in somebody else's terminal, and never looked back.

Nah, I was anti-tab because tab handling in bad editors sucked.  On my
list of bad editors includes pico, nano and joe.  Once I moved to vim
and started playing around with python, I realized the value of the
tabs.

The following may sound harsh.  I had many different people say it to me
and I thought it was harsh at the time but over the years I've
learned... learn your editor.  Its a vital tool.  Quite frankly I'm not
in the mood most of the time to dumb down what I do and spend a crapload
of extra keystrokes to make someone who doesn't know their editor
happier.  The "someone else" in the above example had a crappy editor
and didn't know his tools.  In our case, ebuild development is not
something for people who can't figure out tabs or spend 5 seconds using
google :P

The use of spaces forces presentation.  Just because you happen to like
spaces, I am now forced to deal with your idea of whitespace in a
document.  The use of tabs allows for the seperation of presentation and
the actual data... I, the person reading it, can tell my editor a tab is
4 spaces or 2 spaces or 8.  Two different people seeing the same file
can see it in different ways but if they both use tabs then it won't
matter because it will be the same file.

I do think this matter is a very minor one and this email thread blows
it out of proportion.  I really don't care as much as this email
probably sounds like I care, when I discuss things I tend to get
forceful :).  

Its an age old flamewar and I doubt any minds will change... :)


-- 

Bruce A. Locke
blocke@××××××.org