INN indentation

[Perry E. Metzger]

Delurking for a moment...

On 9/19/21 06:26, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
>
> (My personal preference would be to completely ban the tab character 
> from source code, enforced with build time tests, since the meaning of 
> the tab character depends on local configuration and it is, 
> empirically, unrealistic to assume that everyone will share the same 
> configuration.

Git offers the ability to check constraints like this on check-in.

I agree with the notion of banning tabs characters from from source 
code. This doesn't of course mean that one doesn't still use the tab key 
while typing in one's editor, just that one configures it to indent with 
spaces. See, for example:

https://www.jwz.org/doc/tabs-vs-spaces.html

for a thorough discussion of the options in the choice space.

If, however, such a thing is going to be done, it would mean a lot of 
whitespace changes to review. Luckily, many modern versions of diff 
(including that in git) can be configured to ignore whitespace changes 
when diffing, to make review of such modifications easier. That said, 
the bigger issue is that large changes like this often break development 
branches quite badly, though again, the ability to do 
whitespace-indifferent diffs can help somewhat.

Perry