Re: [PATCH] whitespace: fix initial-indent checking

On Sun, Dec 16, 2007 at 11:00:55AM +0100, Wincent Colaiuta wrote:

El 16/12/2007, a las 10:08, Jakub Narebski escribió:

quoted

J. Bruce Fields wrote:

quoted

This allows catching initial indents like '\t        ' (a tab followed
by 8 spaces), while previously indent-with-non-tab caught only indents
that consisted entirely of spaces.

I prefer to use tabs for indent, but _spaces_ for align. While previous,
less strict version of check catches indent using spaces, this one also
catches _align_ using spaces.

No, the previous version didn't work for the align-with-spaces case
either.  Consider, for example,

struct widget *find_widget_by_color(struct color *color,
                                    int nth_match, unsigned long flags)

If following a "indent-with-tabs, align-with-spaces" policy, then the
initial whitespaace on the second line should be purely spaces
(otherwise adjusting the tab stops would ruin the alignment).  But
indent-with-non-tab would flag this as incorrect even before my fix.

I'd say that Jakub's is a fairly common use case (it's used in many places 
in the Git codebase too, I think) so it would be a bad thing to change the 
behaviour of "indent-with-non-tab".

If you also want to check for "align-with-non-tab" then it really should be 
a separate, optional class of whitespace error.

I would agree with you if it were not for the fact that if you're using
an "indent-with-tabs, align-with-spaces" policy then the only indent
whitespace problems that you can flag automatically are space-before-tab
problems; anything else requires knowledge of the language syntax.

So indent-with-non-tab has only ever been useful for projects that
insist on tabs for all sequences of 8 spaces in the initial whitespace.

--b.