Re: [Tracker] Whitespace clean up

[Martyn Russell <martyn lanedo com>]

On 10/12/09 11:46, Philip Van Hoof wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-12-10 at 11:16 +0000, Martyn Russell wrote:
> > On 10/12/09 10:57, Carlos Garnacho wrote:
> > > <snip>
> > >
> > > I still find that indenting quite cumbersome, emacs has automatic
> > > indent-on-tab support and doing anything custom is extra-painful, since
> > > there are some circumstances where emacs thinks it's ok to reindent some
> > > line (pressing ';' at the end of the line for example), I generally like
> > > the glib/gtk+ approach (no tabs), since alignment will obviously be
> > > correct, and it's easy for current editors to do that.
> >
> > That's a good point. Actually, I spoke to Tim Janik about this and how
> > it works for GTK+ and also Mitch Natterer for how they doing things on
> > GIMP (which has a very clean code base) and they both recommend spaces
> > exclusively. This way:
> >
> > - the alignments are always correct according to the coding style
> > - diffs don't look weird because of the initial \t
> >
> > I am definitely convinced after talking to Tim and Mitch that we should
> > use purely spaces. What do others think?
>
> No thanks.
>
> It would also introduce a complete diff, instead of just a big diff.

It does anyway changing everything the way you want it, so that point is 
irrelevant.

> I think it's insane to so drastically change things.

We are doing this anyway even with just the trailing whitespace changes.

> I also find all-spaces to be more work (I used it for the coding on
> tumbler, among other things, and it was far from being fun to keep the
> code-flow correct. Compared to tabs for indentation at least).

Actually, your editor is really the problem here then. We can't move 
forward on this without SOMEONE updating their editor anyway.

> I think not only should code be cute to look at, it should also be fun
> and fast to write.

Again, this is an editor thing. At least with Emacs, using the tab 
button automatically does all this for you.

> All-spaces isn't fun, and certainly isn't fast to
> write. It's rather pedantic, and more of an ideology for the all-spaces
> fanbase than a pragmatic something that really works.

It isn't more pedantic than tabs and spaces in special cases which is 
how you want it. In fact it is far simpler.

Personally I would rather all tabs or all spaces to make things simpler, 
but all tabs simply doesn't work here.

Also, what does all space fanbase etc have to do with anything? I am 
talking about what logically makes more sense and is less problematic 
for editors/patches/maintenance/etc.

--
Regards,
Martyn