Re: [gentoo-dev] Some 'proper coding' notes for ebuilds

[George Shapovalov <george@gentoo.org>]

Well, looks like there is no one around who remembers this thing, so I guess 
I'll chime in:

This (tabbed indentation) is indeed a policy. The resuidual indications of 
that can be found if you run lintool on some ebuild - it will complain about 
spaces before or after the line, tabs are ok (and are supposed to be used for 
indentation). While not really used nowadays, lintool is still a usefull 
tool, albeit unmaintained :(.  Repoman still does not have long-promised 
ebuild integrity checks (not all of them at least), therefore I would still 
recommend running lintool on new submissions and such (you just have to learn 
its (few) misreported features).

There has been a discussion of this issue, I believe over a year ago already. 
It has been decided that this indeed is a serious issue, worth being brought 
into the policy (main reason I beleive was to settle the never-ending 
debates). everybody agreed that it should be either all spaces or all tabs (I 
hope nobody would want it otherwise nowadays?) 
Upon weighting arguments thrown by bioth groups we have settled on all tabs. 
IIRC the deciding reason was that with tabs everyone is free to use their own 
level of indentation, while with spaces you are pretty much stuck with what 
particular developer used. Therefore we would have to enforce that particular 
aspect as well. Oh, should I mention that I am on a tabbed side ;)?

And on this account:
>Because, in any non-trivial piece of code, indents can end up being a mixture 
>of tabs and spaces, rather than just tabs.  When this happens, and you use a 
This is against a policy and is strictly forbidden. All ebuilds in the tree 
should only use tabs!

>different tab size to the author, the indented code suddenly becomes a tad 
>unreadable.
Above makes this a non-issue, and as I described in the beginning we do have 
that enforceent and we put it in place upon discussing alternatives and on 
purpose.

George

On Sunday 03 August 2003 11:53, Stuart Herbert wrote:
> Sorry, but your arguments aren't convincing me yet that
>
> a) This belongs in the coding standards at all, and
> b) That tabs are the way to do this
>
> I guess I'm just a cantankerous old bugger, as we say over here ;-)



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