Re: On Tabs and Spaces
From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: 2016-06-15 22:43:42
On Wed, 17 Oct 2007, Luke Lu wrote:
Well, we just established that all-space is perfect, look-wise.
But we also established that an all-space model is not stable, because any unix developers will start adding tabs instead of spaces.
As I mentioned, an all-space policy is trivial to enforce.
Hell no, it's not. More importantly, I can guarantee that certain developers will refuse to be part of such a project with such an idiotic design that eats disk-space for no gain, and makes it impossible for me to use my normal editor.
But I still haven't seen any compelling arguments against the "all space" case, other than "people will screw it up into mixed spaces", which is really a straw man, as many multi-platform projects enforced the all-space policy easily by using a pre-commit hook in maintainers' repository.
Hey, you start your own projct, and you can enforce whatever idiotic rules you want to. But in the meantime, all-tab indentations are equally good, and are the defacto rule. So *you* are the one who should show compelling arguments for changing, and so far you haven't shown any. Really: what is the problem with hardtabs? Absolutely none. Linus