Re: [patch@35055] vms.c rmsexpand refactor

On Jan 2, 2009, at 10:14 AM, John Malmberg wrote:

> Craig A. Berry wrote:
>>

>> Any manual attempt to sort out what was going on was pretty much  
>> sunk by having hundreds of lines consisting only of non-significant  
>> whitespace changes -- consider using diff -b.
>
> I made the whitespace changes in order to make the code easier to  
> follow while I was refactoring it.
>
> How about I submit a patch that does the whitespace changes only as  
> a first step with no other bug fixes?

If you can do that, isn't it just as easy to submit a patch that  
doesn't mess with the existing indentation?

> And to make things consistent, what tab character usage policy do  
> you want?  No tabs, tabs on 8 character boundaries?
>
> I prefer the tabs on 8 character boundaries.


A lot of people do, but since everyone puts their tab stops in  
different places, that generally leads to mayhem if anyone else wants  
to read your code in a different editor and/or with different  
settings.  The standard described in perlstyle.pod is to use 4-column  
indents with spaces, not tabs, but preserving the existing indent  
style trumps that as long as what's already there is done  
consistently.  The code you are working on uses 2-column indent with  
considerable consistency except where tabs have snuck in here and  
there from various patches.  IMO whatever gain there might be from  
changing the indent style does not offset the loss from not being able  
to easily see what's changed.
________________________________________
Craig A. Berry
mailto:[email protected]

"... getting out of a sonnet is much more
  difficult than getting in."
                  Brad Leithauser