Re: On Tabs and Spaces

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Oct 17, 2007, 15:53 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.0.999.0710170849590.26902@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <3A9408D5-2667-43A6-A0CE-C0720B3A3987@vicaya.com>

On Wed, 17 Oct 2007, Luke Lu wrote:

> 
> Well, we just established that all-space is perfect, look-wise.

But we also established that an all-space model is not stable, because any unix developers will start adding tabs instead of spaces.

> As I mentioned, an all-space policy is trivial to enforce.

Hell no, it's not.

More importantly, I can guarantee that certain developers will refuse to be part of such a project with such an idiotic design that eats disk-space for no gain, and makes it impossible for me to use my normal editor.

> But I still haven't seen any compelling arguments against the "all space"
> case, other than "people will screw it up into mixed spaces", which is really
> a straw man, as many multi-platform projects enforced the all-space policy
> easily by using a pre-commit hook in maintainers' repository.

Hey, you start your own projct, and you can enforce whatever idiotic rules you want to.

But in the meantime, all-tab indentations are equally good, and are the defacto rule. So *you* are the one who should show compelling arguments for changing, and so far you haven't shown any.

Really: what is the problem with hardtabs? Absolutely none.

			Linus