Re: Overriding the value of indent-tabs-mode in Emacs code

[Karl Fogel]

Michael Heerdegen <address@hidden> writes:
>Dmitry Gutov <address@hidden> writes:
>> We do. Gradually. Using .dir-locals.el.
>
>Dumb question: why don't we just convert the files to the spaces
>convention, if that's the goal anyway?  Doing it gradually patch by
>patch (patches that are sometimes harder to read) seems to be quite
>troublesome...

It might be worth it, but it does cause a "blame shadow" across the whole 
source tree at that point in history.  That is, when one is using 'git blame' 
to find out the provenance of certain lines of code, one's view into the past 
gets obscured by this single revision that touched gazillions of lines of the 
Emacs source code.

This can be worked around, of course -- you just step back past that special 
revision and try again -- but it is a bit of inconvenience when one is digging 
through history.

(Subversion did something like this in 2006: 
http://svn.apache.org/viewvc?view=revision&revision=858545)

Best regards,
-Karl