bug#20322: 25.0.50; indent-tabs-mode should default to nil

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 04/14/2015 06:59 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> Then by all means let's fix those modes whose defaults aren't.

So, most of them? Like I said, in the end that would call for the change 
of the default value. In the meantime, should we have an 
xxx-indent-tabs-mode variable per major mode?

Here's some statistics: http://sideeffect.kr/popularconvention/#java 
(you can click on the language names), sources at 
https://github.com/outsideris/popularconvention

I understand that C (and, to lesser extent, C++) have a lot of history, 
and a lot of variance in their communities.

But the only semi-official style guide I could find that advises to use 
tabs in the Linux kernel one: 
http://www.maultech.com/chrislott/resources/cstyle/LinuxKernelCodingStyle.txt

The GNU coding style, to the best of my understanding, does not mention 
tabs at all.

> The vast majority of people I work with use tabs, FWIW.

Do they use 8-column offsets, then?

> > Even folks who want tabs have to configure stuff, because of our
> > `tab-width' default (which is indeed something we cannot change now):
> > http://stackoverflow.com/a/21788651/615245
>
> Our tab-width default is simply the default tab width everywhere.

I'm not sure what you mean by that, but my point was, the defaults are 
not suitable as-is (even) for a certain part of our users that use tabs.