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Date: Thu, 02 Dec 2010 06:50:48 -0800
From: Patricia Shanahan <pats@acm.org>
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To: river-dev@incubator.apache.org
Subject: Re: Formatting of River Source Tree
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Gregg Wonderly wrote:
> As I've said here before and elsewhere, I really feel that tabs only is 
> the most beneficial indentation to use.  The reason is that it allows 
> people who use odd tab intervals to still see things and use their tab 
> key while editing without having to change their IDE settings while 
> editing.
> 
> Sun has an old formatting document that discusses using spaces only, and 
> netbeans does this by default.  The biggest issue for me, of course, is 
> that I use 4 character tab expansion and tabs only in all of my 
> development.
> 
> In an open source world, all tabs is really the only thing that provides 
> the most flexibility it seems to me.

My current approach in making changes to River is to try to be 
consistent with the code around the change.

I am very strongly opposed to mixing tabs and space, because it loses 
indentation consistency unless viewed with the same tab size as was used 
to create it.

I prefer all spaces because it avoids the nasty over-indentation you get 
if all tabs is viewed in with 8 spaces per tab. For example, tabbed code 
has real problems when  quoted in mail or newsgroup messages. However, 
I'm generally willing to be flexible about this sort of thing.

Patricia