On 11.7.2007, at 2.06, Anders F Björklund wrote:
Ryan Schmidt wrote:
The simple solution being defining tabs to something like 8.
To bring back some of the arguments from earlier threads: I do not wish to configure my editor to use 8-space tabs. I prefer 4-space tabs. This is why editors let you change the tab width: because it's a personal preference. Do not force your personal preferences on me. Different people prefer 4- or 8- or 2- or 3-space tab settings in their editors, and that's just fine. They should be allowed to do that.
It's of course possible to keep indentation in Portfiles up to the port maintainer. Maybe I should have mention that suggested "port lint" didn't actually check any indentation, just the use of newlines between certain port constructs...
BTW; 8 is the default Unix hard tab size, not anything personal (it will show up when using for instance a browser or terminal)
To say my word, too, here: I have tried to follow the traditional model quite long, using lots of tabs actually. That of course works quite well, as whitespace in proper places makes the file readable. Lately I have changed my own writing somewhat, due to my use of emacs, because then I don't have to take care of the indentation myself. Emacs has its own mode for tcl, that works quite well. It can be adjusted, so if in the future a common coding style is agreed upon, perhaps a document page is written to define the correct values for all the variables concerned.
But this is the reason why using tabs to keep columns aligned is a bad idea and should not be done -- columns become unaligned for all tab-width settings other than the one the author used. This is also a reason why using spaces everywhere, even for line indentation, is bad IMHO: it forces your personal line indentation preference on everyone else.
Unless there is a common project line indentation standard, it's no useful idea of trying to force anything upon anyone.
I agree. However, I'd say, it's perhaps more important to have some indentation (I think this is the case) than to try very hard to define, what it's like.
Other users will of course argue that their editors are configured to use spaces, and they do not wish to reconfigure their editors to use tabs... I think this is where we stalemated last time.
Maybe just keep it flexible then ? Or leave it to the Portfile prettyprinter, to show the Portfiles in some readable manner... (and adding some syntax coloring wouldn't hurt either, probably can use Tcl with some extra keywords for the common variables?)
Standardizing the variable order might not be a bad thing though, nor providing a Portfile template (whether blank or interactive).
--anders
I'll second that. Some of the portfiles are large, and to read them is a lot easier, if variables, phases, and variants are always in some definite order. I don't myself see very much significance between different indentation styles. I'd guess most of files can read files with some (intelligible) indentation. Flexibility on the other hand makes it easier to write them, as each one of us likes to do things in a personal way (that said, it doesn't matter to me, if I can adjust my tcl-mode to indent the lines in the generally accepted and recommended manner). ! ! Jyrki Wahlstedt ! http://www.wahlstedt.fi/jyrki/ ! ! Our life is no dream; but it ought to become one and perhaps will. ! PGP key ID: 0x139CC386 fingerprint: F355 B46F 026C B8C1 89C0 A780 6366 EFD9 139C C386