Re: On Tabs and Spaces

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Wed, 17 Oct 2007, Luke Lu wrote:
> 
> Well, we just established that all-space is perfect, look-wise.

But we also established that an all-space model is not stable, because any 
unix developers will start adding tabs instead of spaces.

> As I mentioned, an all-space policy is trivial to enforce.

Hell no, it's not.

More importantly, I can guarantee that certain developers will refuse to 
be part of such a project with such an idiotic design that eats disk-space 
for no gain, and makes it impossible for me to use my normal editor.

> But I still haven't seen any compelling arguments against the "all space"
> case, other than "people will screw it up into mixed spaces", which is really
> a straw man, as many multi-platform projects enforced the all-space policy
> easily by using a pre-commit hook in maintainers' repository.

Hey, you start your own projct, and you can enforce whatever idiotic rules 
you want to. 

But in the meantime, all-tab indentations are equally good, and are the 
defacto rule. So *you* are the one who should show compelling arguments 
for changing, and so far you haven't shown any.

Really: what is the problem with hardtabs? Absolutely none.

			Linus