Portfile whitespace issues

[Eric Hall]

On Thu, Mar 15, 2007 at 10:15:58AM -0400, Daniel J. Luke 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).

	Indeed.  I think dictating spacing will be a headache for
current and potential maintainers and result in fewer people joining
in.
	Adding a suggestion in the Portfile maintenance doc
about documenting the tab/space width used would help others figure out
what the spacing is w/o having to try a variety of possibilities, should
they need to adjust a Portfile at some time.


		-eric