A lot of the macports base files actually were written with 8-space tabs, and then edited later with 4-space soft tabs (at least, that's my assumption based on some tabbing assuming 8-space, and some soft tabs at the end of other tabs that are 4-width long).

In any case, using 4-space tabs will not have a detrimental effect on your editor, unless you're editing lines using soft tabs inside base/ when you have your editor set to hard tabs. And I don't see much editing of base/ going on these days (aside from my recent changes), so I think it's safe to say that won't happen ;)

In any case, I'm pretty sure there are existing programs to convert tabs, but I can't recall any offhand. Even if there aren't, it should be trivial to write one. And as for the 8-space vs 4-space issue, anybody using an editor set to 4-width tabs already has a problem with these (and I would venture to guess that's most people), so I see no issue with simply converting them and letting people re-indent if they edit a file that has a problem.

On Feb 13, 2007, at 12:43 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:

On Feb 11, 2007, at 22:56, Kevin Ballard wrote:


Are there any more thoughts on this matter?


For now, every line I modify is going to have its hard tabs converted to 4-width soft tabs (and reindented if necessary).


Why will this occur? Is it because this is how your editor is configured, and you do not want to change your editor configuration? If so, then this is not a good reason; if we change the spacing rules as you propose, then you will fix this problem for yourself, but also cause the same problem for me and others with editor settings like mine.


I'd really like to do a single pass and convert the entire source base over to 4-width soft tabs, but it seems we have at least one dissenter.


Can we come to an agreement on an overall policy for this?


If nobody else has any objections to converting to all spaces, I'll learn to live with it too. But a question occurs to me: How will you convert the entire source base over to 4-space-width soft tabs? Is there already a program to do that? You can't of course just replace all occurrences of ASCII 0x09 with 4 instances of ASCII 0x20; you'd need anywhere from 1 to 4 spaces depending on preceding characters on the line.


If we agree to convert to all spaces, then I'd like there to be a script that does the above available as part of the MacPorts distribution, or as an installable port, so that I can use that script over any files that I modify, since as I've said, my editor does and will use tabs, and I'll need an easy automated way to replace those with the right number of spaces before committing.


Also, I think the whole reason for this exercise is that not all people have had 4-space-width tabs before, making things look weird when the local editor setting doesn't match the port author's editor setting. What about those portfiles that were written with 8-space-width tabs? How will you identify such files to properly replace the tab characters with between 1 and 8 spaces? Or will you not attempt to identify these files, and just assume all tabs in all files are 4-space-width tabs? Won't that make things even uglier for those files, until all portfiles are manually examined and corrected, which would likely be a random discovery process that would take a long indeterminate amount of time if not done in a coordinated manner? During which time indentation of random portfiles would still be ugly, which is the very problem you're trying to fix by changing the spacing?


Is it useful to consider the use of a tcl prettyprinter, rather than just converting tabs to spaces? Is there such a tool? Would there need to be a specialized MacPorts portfile prettyprinter, rather than a generic tcl one?


-- 
Kevin Ballard
http://kevin.sb.org
eridius@macports.org
http://www.tildesoft.com