[sane-devel] [janitorial] leading whitespace: spaces XOR tabs

[Gerhard Jäger]

Hi Olaf,

On 12.07.2017 at 14:33 Olaf Meeuwissen wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I just committed the last compiler warning fixes and made the Debian 9
> builds "AWARE".  Now any compiler warnings on all 4 Debian builds will
> bomb the build in question and hence prevent the creation of a new
> snapshot tarball.
> 
> I mentioned[1] that the plustek-pp backend's indenting defied me but
> after some staring at the code I realized it was using a four spaces to
> the tab convention.  Convincing my editor to do the same made it a lot
> easier to understand the intended behaviour but fixing the "mess" was
> still a very delicate affair.  I had to change the mixed use of spaces
> and tabs used to indent to *exactly* match in order to silence compiler
> warnings.
> 
>   [1] https://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/sane-devel/2017-June/035445.html

[...]

I obviously ignored you - sorry for that. And yes, I did follow at these old
days my own rules, not using tabs, but 4 spaces - in an inconsistent way.
Sorry - 'twas a long time ago ;)

> This whole exercise has made me look at the whole code base in a little
> more detail and, quite frankly, the use of leading whitespace is a total
> and utter mess.  Some places are better of than others but on the whole
> it's pretty pathetic.
> 
> # Just make your editor visually distinguish spaces and tabs and you'll
> # see.  I used Emacs' whitespace-mode (in its default configuration) and
> # it "lit up the place" in a variety of colours.
> 
> So here's a few "rules" I'd like to apply in order to address this.
> Each file
[...]
> # Personally, I would much prefer to uses spaces everywhere the file
> # format permits (with a minor execption for files used by make, see
> # above) over the board.
> # You may find the following blog post of interest ;-)
> #
> #  https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/06/15/developers-use-spaces-make-money-use-tabs/
> 
> If anyone objects, I'm open to suggestions, including "Why bother? Just
> use spaces!" ;-)
> 
> If I hear nothing, the tools/style-check.sh script will be modified to
> implement these rules and can then be use to check for any "violations"
> and (recursively) fix them.

Are you sure you want to rework the whole code base? Is it a good idea?
Well maybe for unmaintained backends, but what about the others? In fact
I have here some long pending patch (64 bit awareness) that most probably
no longer apply.

Just my two cents,
  Gerhard

BTE: Thanks for caring anyhow.