Re: On Tabs and Spaces

On Wed, 17 Oct 2007, Tom Tobin wrote:

And, of course, this still comes up against the *benefits* of
all-spaces.  Benefits which have been mentioned by several people;
benefits which you refuse to *acknowledge*, even if they don't sway you.

I notice how you didn't even list them. Why? Because they don't exist? 

So here's the deal: I claim that "use hard-tabs, and accept that they are 
8 characters wide" is a provably working situation. For lots of *large* 
projects. I'm not some odd-ball person here, I bet that if you go and look 
at any sourceforge entry that is written in C (which is the language we're 
debating here), you'll find that the ones that use hard-tabs (even if they 
use spaces for smaller indents) are the vast majority.

So what's your point? You're pushing something that is provably odd-ball, 
since almost nobody uses it, and you cannot even state what the huge 
advantages are, and you claim that I'm the one that ignores them, when it 
is *you* who have refused to acknowledge that there are reasons to *not* 
do it (one big reason being that there are current existing and 
productive developers that definitely do *not* want to change - and no, 
it wasn't just me, either).

Your arguments make no sense. So *of*course* they don't sway me.

And you know what? I don't much care if you aren't swayed by mine. It's to 
some degree a matter of taste, and the fact is, if you don't like the 
current git model, you can go away and play with your own model. It *is* 
open source, after all. 

Put another way: if you cannot respect the wishes of the people who have 
done the work, then I damn well have no reason what-so-ever to respect 
*yours*. 

		Linus