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

[John Dennis]

On 08/21/2009 05:06 AM, Ville Skyttä wrote:
> 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.

I think you might be mistaken. There is a group of people who believe 
there is an ASCII character whose semantic is "indent step". If 
something should be indented 2 levels then there should be two "indent 
step" characters which proceed it. They also believe how wide each 
indent step is is a per user preference. They have co-opted the ASCII 
tab character for this purpose. Some editors accommodate this philosophy 
by allowing each user to set their own "tab width" which expands each 
indent step character into the proper number of spaces.

The argument over whether to use tabs and what their width is has been a 
holy war for as long as I've programmed.

The proponents of "tab as indent step" have one major usability issue 
against them, you can never just open a text file and have it be 
readable unless you reset the tab width appropriately for each file. 
This is an enormous pain in the butt which is why the other camp is 
adamant about using spaces which have no ambiguity and require no 
special handling. Think of it as a portability issue.
-- 
John Dennis <jdennis at redhat.com>

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