Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

[Peter Miller <millerp AT canb.auug.org.au>]

On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 12:33 -0800, Asheesh Laroia wrote:
> pmiller has committed an .indent.pro file to the source tree that switches 
> us to GNU style indenting, which is fine.  Curiously, he sets --tab-size0 
> rather than giving tabs a width > 0.  Why?

Because different people tell their editor to have different tab widths,
and then fill their code with tabs.  (Some editors fail to distinguish
indent steps from tab widths.)  This means for them, the code is
correctly formatted, but for everyone else who has different tabs, the
indenting is wrong, and ugly wrong at that.  The only way around it is
to not use tabs at all, thus --tab-size0

Those little block comments telling emacs and vi and nedit what to do
with the file in C mode can also help, but it doesn't help for other
unknown brain dead editors, and you wind up with one per editor, which
is no longer a little block comment and looks even uglier.

Regards
Peter Miller <millerp AT canb.auug.org.au>
/\/\*        http://miller.emu.id.au/pmiller/

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