Subject: Re: bug#17012: [3 PATCHES] Whitespace cleanup : Replace code-alignment tabs with spaces.

From: Jim Meyering <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 09:12:12 -0700

On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 7:36 AM, Paul Eggert <[email-masked]> wrote:
> behoffski wrote:
>>
>> One easy way to spot tab characters in C sources
>
>
> This is grep, right?  So we should use "grep '  '".
>
> Jim Meyering has the strongest feeling about tabs, so I assume he'll pick
> this one up.

Hi Brenton,

I do indeed have strong feelings about tabs :-)
Like remove all leading ones, and any TAB-after-space.
[rules to enforce that are in maint.mk and cfg.mk]
However, a few times when a crusade led me to do
what you're proposing and eliminate all of them, I later realized
that I found value in TAB-aligned comments, and actually regretted
performing that particular TAB->SP+ conversion.

On a code normalization front, I am inclined to fully automate the
process, and have spent time (though not recently) trying to find
the combination of settings in the uncrustify tool that recreate the
style we use in a few projects. If you feel like pursuing this, please
look at uncrustify and see if you can minimize the changes required
to move grep to something uncrustify-generated.

Bottom line, I'm not terribly keen on changing comment-aligning
tabs to spaces.

Thanks,
Jim