Re: On Tabs and Spaces

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Oct 18, 2007, 03:23 UTC
Message-ID: <20071018032307.GA7313@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.0.999.0710171955580.26902@woody.linux-foundation.org>

On Wed, Oct 17, 2007 at 08:13:23PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> Yes. 
> 
> You're missing the fact that some people have problems with editors.
> 
> So they add a line, and they add *that* line with the wrong kind of 
> indentation. And it shows up among the other lines like this (here the 
> whole patch is indented):

Oh. I thought you meant "if you have an all-spaces policy, your diffs will not look good." But what you meant was "when people screw up your policy by mixing tabs and spaces, your diffs will not look good." And that applies equally, whether they are screwing up your all-tabs or all-spaces setup (and I remain convinced that no matter what your policy, people _will_ screw it up).

Thanks for the clarification.

> It's very seldom the case that you grow some problem space and performance 
> stays the same.

Yes. I wondered whether the increased size would really matter here, or if it would get lost in the noise of program startup and other activities. But in this case, it really does matter.

> > Gah, I can't believe I've not only been sucked into a tab vs spaces
> > discussion, but now I've actually wasted time doing a performance
> > comparison on it.
> Well, performance analysis isn't exactly a "waste". That "git grep" was

No, it's not a waste. In the grand scheme of things, I don't actually care that much about the result, but hey, I think I may be the only person out of this gigantic thread to actually provide _numbers_. :)

> Yeah, I don't think it's wonderful, but it might even be a good thing as a 
> "hey, at least you are aware of the notion of GC now" kind of introduction 
> to people (who then hopefully realize that they don't actually want 
> automatic GC, but rather do it once a week or something).

It would have been nicer if it said something like "Your repository looks crufty. Running git-gc --auto..." using whatever terms users would be comfortable with. Instead, it just started with "Counting objects" and a long wait. I happen to know what that means, but I'm not sure how a git newbie would react (though it looked _much_ nicer because of Nico's recent terser progress patches).

-Peff