Re: On Tabs and Spaces

On Wed, 17 Oct 2007, Jeff King wrote:

On Wed, Oct 17, 2007 at 05:59:27PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:

quoted

It happens. We do de-spacification in the kernel occasionally when it is
an annoyance. Usually it shows up in patches, though - exactly because
code which adds spaces instead of tabs won't line up correctly in the
diff.

You have made this claim several times, and I really don't understand
it. If I have 8 spaces, then a diff line will have either " ", "+", or
"-" followed by 8 spaces. If I use a hard tab, then the tab will end up
only taking up 7 spaces because of the nature of tabs.

This might matter if I'm comparing non-diff code to diff code. But in a
diff, _everything_ is indented by exactly one space, so it all lines up.
Is there something I'm missing?

if the code uses a tab and the patch uses 8 spaces the two will not line 
up in the diff becouse in the diff output the tab is 'only 7 spaces;

useing one or the other isn't the problem, it's the mixing of the two.

David Lang