Mailing-List: contact tomcat-dev-help@jakarta.apache.org; run by ezmlm
From: "Conor MacNeill" <conor@m64.com>
To: <tomcat-dev@jakarta.apache.org>
Subject: RE: [PATCH] eliminate duplicated code in ant Jar and Zip taskdefs
Date: Thu, 30 Dec 1999 18:04:16 +1100
Message-ID: <003a01bf5294$16088dc0$80dc1fcb@cognetnt.cognet.com.au>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
In-Reply-To: <B48FB751.FD49%jon@clearink.com>
Importance: Normal

>
> Right, but if the original code is done as spaces, then I vote to leave it
> as spaces. Mixing spaces and tabs is a bad thing imho.
>
> Personally, I hate the tabs because it makes the cvs commit email messages
> look like crap in my email client/font selection.
>
> -jon
>

Jon,

I agree that tabs are a pain. In general, I don't use the Sun (and tomcat)
coding style so I was quite careful to make sure it "looked" alright before
I submitted the patch. I used tabs because, from the previous "tab"
discussion, that seemed to be the general feeling (indent 4, tab as
possible).

I believe there is also some interaction as to how the various email clients
render tabs. I used Outlook to post this patch. It seems to have inserted
the tabs that were present in my patch correctly but when I read the patch
as sent back from the list, it seems to render them using a tab size of 6. I
think Sam's client may behave differently as may yours. An email attachment
may make more sense for patches but I tend to avoid using attachments on
mailing lists.

When I made these changes I did not check what conventions the file was
currently using. I didn't think developers had to examine each file they
wished to change to see what conventions it is using and then change their
setup to maintain that style? I would prefer a single consistent style :-)

I think much of this angst stems from the fact that the use of tabs or
spaces is unspecified in the coding style. Unspecified behaviour is not
really the Java way :-) My preference would be to specify this behaviour by
eliminating tabs altogether.

thoughts?

Cheers
Conor