Vodz, your tabstop is wrong.

Rob Landley rob at landley.net
Mon Oct 17 08:46:53 UTC 2005


On Monday 17 October 2005 02:34, Vladimir N. Oleynik wrote:
> Rob,
>
> > In busybox we use a tabstop of 4.  There are even special vi comments,
> > ala: /* vi: set sw=4 ts=4: */
>
> Vi is not single editor and viewer in wordl.

I realise that vi is not the only editor in the editor in the world.  You 
change the tabstop for other editors in other ways.  That doesn't change the 
fact that the tabstop for _busybox_ is 4, no matter what editor you're using.

> Why? Its personal for "vi"? Then "vi" must die!

And your translator program must die too.  Shall we continue to insult each 
others' tools?

A) I didn't set this policy, it predates my participation in busybox.

B) The fact the above comment only works for vi is irrelevant, I was just 
using it as evidence of what our tabstop is.  Emacs has something similar 
(which is longer and has to go at the end of the file), but the general 
approach emacs guys take is to create some kind of spec file for the project 
or something.  I dunno, ask an emacs guy.

> I do not changes tabsop now for non my applets,
> but my applets I can`t write with this idiotes tabstop idea.

I'm not quite sure what your'e trying to say here, as usual.

> > Previously, it was lined up correctly.
> >
> > Fix your tabstop.
>
> No. Only after your rewrite "cat", "less", "mozilla composer",
> my personal editor ;-) and other zillion editors and viewers
> with parse /* vi: set sw=4 ts=4: */ line.

As I said, that is only one way to set the tabstop, and its presence in the 
file serves merely as evidence of what the standard tabstop IS.  I'm sorry 
this is coming as a suprise to you after all this time, but the reality 
remains.

It's also in busybox/docs/style-guide.txt:

> Furthermore, The preference is that tabs be set to display at four spaces
> wide, but the beauty of using only tabs (and not spaces) at the beginning of
> lines is that you can set your editor to display tabs at *whatever* number
> of spaces is desired and the code will still look fine.

Unfortunately, the end of that sentence is not always true (as demonstrated by 
your most recent whitespace mangling patch).  Normally, it doesn't come up.  
However, in this case, you broke it, and I reverted the breakage.

I didn't make this up, and it's not vi-specific.  Really it isn't.  That's 
just the editor I happen to use, and thus the one I know how to set the 
tabstop for automatically.

Notice that the style guide is over _five_years_old_, and the very first 
version had the tabstop 4 in it.  (And an "autoindent.pro" file, which I'm 
guessing is that emacs thing I was thinking of):

http://www.busybox.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/trunk/busybox/docs/style-guide.txt?rev=900&view=markup

Rob



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