'lo Martin, On Sunday 03 August 2003 4:18 pm, Martin Schlemmer wrote: > On Sun, 2003-08-03 at 16:55, Stuart Herbert wrote: > > On Sunday 03 August 2003 3:34 am, Mike Frysinger wrote: > > > (2) do not use spaces for indenting ... tabs are the standard > > > > Then the standard is broken, and needs updating. > > Reasoning ? 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 different tab size to the author, the indented code suddenly becomes a tad unreadable. This page puts it a bit better (and stronger ;-) than I can: http://www.jwz.org/doc/tabs-vs-spaces.html Additionally ... There's no value in insisting on a particular indenting scheme. A good coding standards document is a collection of technical review points to reduce the number of defects that make it into a source control system. If a proposed standard has no effect on the defect rate, it doesn't belong in the coding standards document. Period. (Stuff like epatch over patch technically belongs in the design standards document - but it's common for design and coding standards to be combined into a single document out of ignorance). And, seeing as there's no formal peer review of code committed to CVS anyway, you have no mechanism to enforce the entireity of any proposed standard. Pitch the standard at stuff that actually makes a difference (like epatch over patch). If you really want to enforce an indentation standard, run CVS checkins through indent or something. Automate the mother. That's how many commercial organisations manage that type of problem. Sorry, I've been handling these issues for too many years in the day job. I'll take my SCM hat off now ;-) Stu -- Stuart Herbert stuart@gentoo.org Gentoo Developer http://www.gentoo.org/ Beta packages for download http://dev.gentoo.org/~stuart/packages/ GnuGP key id# F9AFC57C available from http://pgp.mit.edu Key fingerprint = 31FB 50D4 1F88 E227 F319 C549 0C2F 80BA F9AF C57C --