Re: On Tabs and Spaces

From: Christer Weinigel <christer@weinigel.se>
Date: Oct 17, 2007, 21:21 UTC
Message-ID: <20071017232146.4b9e4097@localhost.localdomain>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.0.999.0710171246500.26902@woody.linux-foundation.org>

This is bloody ridiculous, but...

On Wed, 17 Oct 2007 12:53:58 -0700 (PDT) Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:

Show 16 quoted lines

> 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).
> 
> 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*.

I think you would get at lot less argument if you weren't so damn self righteous about it. If you'd just said "it's a matter of taste and hard tabs 8 spaces wide are the way we prefer to do it and that's the way we want to keep doing it" I'd not have any problem with it.

But when you start claiming that there are no reasons to use all spaces, and that it doesn't solve any problems (it definitely does), and that all editors work with hard tabs at 8 (which they don't), at least I get a bit frustrated with you. It's very non-respectful of you to claim that everyone is stupid that doesn't agree with you and is just asking for silly arguments. Yes, I know, you're an opinionated bastard and proud of it, but maybe you should tone that down a bit.

(At least I got quite insulted by your Git talk at Google. People are not stupid just because they don't agree with you, most of the time they just have different preferences or different goals.)

  /Christer (trying to escape from Lilliput)