Re: On Tabs and Spaces

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Oct 17, 2007, 19:53 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.0.999.0710171246500.26902@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <1192649598.6640.44.camel@athena>

On Wed, 17 Oct 2007, Tom Tobin wrote:

> 
> And, of course, this still comes up against the *benefits* of
> all-spaces.  Benefits which have been mentioned by several people;
> benefits which you refuse to *acknowledge*, even if they don't sway you.

I notice how you didn't even list them. Why? Because they don't exist?

So here's the deal: I claim that "use hard-tabs, and accept that they are 8 characters wide" is a provably working situation. For lots of *large* projects. I'm not some odd-ball person here, I bet that if you go and look at any sourceforge entry that is written in C (which is the language we're debating here), you'll find that the ones that use hard-tabs (even if they use spaces for smaller indents) are the vast majority.

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).

Your arguments make no sense. So *of*course* they don't sway me.

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*.

		Linus