Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH] Replace tab-indent with space-indent

[Mark Williamson <mark.williamson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday 02 July 2008, Ian Jackson wrote:
> Masaki Kanno writes ("[Xen-devel] [PATCH] Replace tab-indent with 
space-indent"):
> > This patch replaces tab-indent with space-indent in the following
> > Xend codes.
> >  - tools/python/xen/xend/XendConfig.py
> >  - tools/python/xen/xend/image.py
> >  - tools/python/xen/xend/osdep.py
>
> I don't think that patches like this should be committed.  They have
> no benefit, but they do impose costs (such as  hg annotate  no longer
> giving accurate answers).

If this weren't Python code or was a large change I might be dubious about it.  
However, since a classic source of Python bugs is the mixing of tabs and 
spaces, standardising on spaces (which is what we've always aimed to do) 
seems quite desirable - if for no other reason than to avoid future 
contributors making the same mistake.

That said, it's doubly important to thoroughly check any tab->space 
conversions since these can easily do something other than what's expected...  
Converting a lot of them would be a bit scary...

Kan, are these the only cases of tabs you found in Python code, or might there 
be more elsewhere?  If these are the only few that remain, I'd suggest we 
eliminate them and then work to avoid introducing any more tabs in future  
(ideally, we'd push a check for these into a test suite that's run before the 
patch is accepted).  That would bring us fully into conformance with our own 
coding style; the patch looks small enough to cause a minimal disruption to 
annotate.

If we have a wide tabs / spaces problem in the code then we might want to keep 
this patch on hold and figure out just how large the problem is - and 
therefore whether it's safer to standardise or leave it alone!

Cheers,
Mark


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