[Fedora-packaging] Strawman: standardize 8-space tab width

[Ralf Corsepius]

On 08/21/2009 11:06 AM, Ville Skyttä wrote:
> On Friday 21 August 2009, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>> On 08/21/2009 09:21 AM, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
>>>>>>>> "RC" == Ralf Corsepius<rc040203 at freenet.de>   writes:
>>>
>>> RC>   Tabs only add marginal unreadablity to specs.
>>>
>>> Just to be clear, the proposal wasn't to eliminate tabs from specs,
>>> although that was proposed later in the thread.  The proposal was to
>>> standardize a reasonable tab width.
>>
>> Define reasonable tab with.
>>
>> I guess you mean 8, but, whether you like it or not, there is no
>> "standardized tab width".
>>
>> Conversely, there are huge user groups, who "standardized" to other tab
>> widths, e.g.
>>
>> * Some BSDs systematically use a tab width of 4 everywhere.
>> * Some vi users typically user a tab width of 3 (I am not using vi, so
>> no idea where this originates from).
>> * Many users apply a tab width of 2.
>> * There are editors, which seem to guess on "best tab expansions".
>> ...
>
> You seem to be talking about indent steps instead of tab widths.  They are
> different things.  A lot of projects and people tweak their indent steps to
> their liking (such as in the examples above), but defining tab width is much
> less common and having it set to anything else than 8 is pretty much
> guaranteed to have bad effects somewhere.
Well, I don't understand your point.

I am actually talking about the number of characters, tabs are being 
expanded into when displaying files in editors and the like.

To make them "look nice" and "as desired", "tabbed indentation" and 
"display tab expansion" have to match.

Classical examples would be BSD sources. They typically are 4-char 
indented, using a tab for each "4 chars".

Ralf