Re: Should we have a commit size guideline?

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 12/16/2015 02:13 AM, Paul Eggert wrote:

> That being said, it is annoying when part of a patch consists entirely
> of changing tabs to spaces or vice versa, as this one did,

Did it? Emacs doesn't change tabs to spaces if the indentation level of 
the line hasn't changed.

And anyway, we've always considered tabs-to-spaces changes near some 
actual changed code to be okay. If someone is having a problem reading 
such diffs, Emacs has a wonderful diff-auto-refine-mode.

> This particular botch was undoubtedly caused by the line
> "(emacs-lisp-mode . ((indent-tabs-mode . nil)))" in .dir-locals.el,
> which was recently inserted in the (vain) attempt to get rid of all the
> tabs in .el source files, and we should probably remove that line as in
> practice it really causes more trouble than it's worth.

You're assuming that otherwise every committer would have 
indent-tabs-mode set to nil, which undoubtedly isn't true.

Even if it were true, were this line to be removed, you'd still see the 
same problem with people changing indentation from spaces to tabs in the 
same fashion. There are a lot of lines indented with spaces already.