Re: white space unification?

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Sat, 2 Jul 2005, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:

> Do you guys mind if I run libtool.m4 and ltmain.m4sh through `unexpand',
> and remove all trailing white space (all branches)?

You are saying you want to convert space characters to TAB characters? 
I think that this is a wrong approach.  Instead I would prefer to see 
a standard of only using space characters unless a TAB character is 
required by the script. Using TABs for indentation causes a babble of 
indentation problems because many people have set their editors for 
non-standard (something other than 8 spaces) TAB indentation.  You 
don't want to go there.

Removing trailing spaces sounds fine to me.  Removing all embedded 
TABs except for those that must exist to support the algorithm sounds 
fine to me.

> Furthermore, can I put a rule to this into HACKING, or maybe even have
> `commit' do this by itself, if unexpand is available?  (sh.test is fine,
> too, if you don't want commit to alter the source).

There is probably a GNU coding standard which says you should not do 
this.

> Rationale: I keep seeing white space diffs when looking at hacked up
> libtool variants.  I don't want to see this clutter.  The 4K saving for
> libtool.m4 is a nice but largely irrelevant side effect.

There is a diff option to ignore white space changes.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/