Spacing issues

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Feb 9, 2007, at 10:50, Kevin Ballard wrote:

> The spacing in MacPorts is a bit non-standard. We have mostly tabs,  
> but there's a bunch of spaces in there as well, and it causes for  
> some interesting indentation.
>
> I propose that all future edits be standardized at either 2-width  
> or 4-width soft tabs (as in, spaces). I'd even be willing to  
> convert all existing tcl files to use spaces instead of tabs in one  
> batch, though that could leave indentation issues (but those can be  
> fixed by hand the next time the file is edited).
>
> Is there any reason to keep tabs? Or any other comments?

Is there any reason why we shouldn't

- have tabs at the beginnings of lines to provide indentation
- use spaces within a line when we want to do something like align  
columns

That would seem the most logical solution to me.

Using only spaces seems not so good to me, because

- spaces uses 2 or 4 times as much disk space as a tab
- spaces need 2 or 4 times as many presses on the delete key as a tab  
to remove in my editor
- I can't use my editor's tab width setting to see the amount of  
indentation I want to see