Bikeshed! [was: Portfile whitespace issues]

[Jordan K. Hubbard]

(ref:  http://www.bikeshed.com/)

I love little discussions like this because:

A) The people involved generally feel very strongly about the issue  
in question and get offended when you point out that, in the greater  
scheme of things, 6 billion other people could genuinely give a damn  
about the issue at all.

B) They eat time and energy far better devoted to issues that some  
meaningful fraction of that 6 billion people actually do care about,  
thus deferring the need to grapple with problems that are actually  
hard to solve.

However:

C) Given the fundamental truth of propositions (A) and (B) (which  
even the most passionate participants are aware of, if only  
subconsciously), the discussion generally dies unsettled until some  
reasonable amount of time passes and it can be "reasonably" revived  
again, only to go through the cycle anew.

Therefore, I would like to respectfully suggest that we jump straight  
to (C) and simply decide that this has already run its course early  
and move on before everyone's mailbox fills up with bikeshed paint. :-)

- Jordan

On Mar 15, 2007, at 7:41 AM, Paul Guyot wrote:

>> On Mar 15, 2007, at 3:12 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>>> There were not that many participants. I tried to put up a fight  
>>> in favor of keeping hard tabs, but I was the only one. :-) Upon  
>>> further consideration, I don't think I really care that much one  
>>> way or another, and I do recognize that a whole class of spacing  
>>> issues we currently have in Portfiles would not occur if we did  
>>> not use tabs. So, let's take 'em out!
>>
>> The old rule was that Porfiles should be internally consistent.
>>
>> That was it - and I don't think it's so bad to let portfile  
>> authors handle things however they want as long as the result  
>> isn't totally unreadable for everything else.
>>
>> So, my vote would be for continuing the old policy and not getting  
>> all whitespace-crazy on everything (it makes sense to have one  
>> whitespace convention for base/ code, though).
>
> I concur.
>
> Paul
>
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