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

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 04/17/2015 05:36 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> This argument goes both ways, you know.

You're welcome to use it against myself when an opportunity rises. I 
don't believe it's the case here.

> And no, it's not only my experience, as I mentioned more than once in
> this thread.

Sure, but one's circle of acquaintances is not the best metric.

> Are _you_ open to leaving C and C++ at their current defaults?  What
> would it take to convince you doing that?

A decent statistical analysis of the current active C and C++ projects 
would do it, if it favors tabs (or at least doesn't favor spaces too 
heavily), as well as an obvious-enough way for the users to change the 
indent-tabs-mode value in those modes.

> I gave you mine.  I've seen, and still see, a lot of C/C++ code
> written by others, and they all mix spaces and tabs.

While GitHub is not an ideal sample, it's certainly bigger than your 
sample, don't you agree? And a lot of corporations have been migrating 
their libre software projects to GitHub in the recent years.

> True.  But changing long-lived defaults always annoys people; you can
> see evidence to that on help-gnu-emacs almost every day.  So we
> shouldn't change them without a very good reason.  And I don't see one
> in this case.

Considering the size of the Emacs user base, one might say the evidence 
on help-gnu-emacs is pretty underwhelming (or else we'd be drowning in it).

> I think you underestimate the widespread use of Google and questions
> asked on stack-overflow and such likes.  People simply collect
> snippets from there and paste them into their .emacs.  Problem solved.

Yeah, I guess they do. But that's definitely not ideal.

> But there's nothing wrong with this particular default.  It doesn't
> reduce any functionality.  Users that aren't annoyed enough will learn
> to live with it; those with higher motivation will discover how to
> change that soon enough.  There's no real problem here.  Unlike other
> arguments we had about changing defaults (font-lock, colors, and menus
> come to mind), this one does not affect any functionality at all.

The indentation style is one of the obvious bikeshedding topics. I 
suspect a significant fraction of Emacs users try to make it just right 
in their config from the start.

If you think that that value is not a problem, you shouldn't object to 
changing it to appease the majority either.