[Bug-indent] Re: [Bug-gnulib] merge of acl.c, alloca.c, alloca_.h, regex.c from coreutils

[Jim Meyering]

Bruno Haible <address@hidden> wrote:
> Paul Eggert wrote:
>>      * lib/alloca_.h: Fix white space to match
>>      what GNU indent does.
>
> Hmmpf. This causes gratuitous differences with
>   intl/dcigettext.c
>   intl/loadmsgcat.c
>   intl/localealias.c
>
> Slavishly doing what GNU indent would do

IMHO, consistent cpp indentation is important, especially
when it is as deep as it is in alloca_.h (6! levels).
To the point that I wrote a tool (cppi) to check and produce
the desired indentation.

Of course, that's just a subset of maintaining a consistent
style of code formatting.  Another very worthy goal.  Many times,
I've embarked on seemingly nearly-worthless and nit-picky clean-up
jobs only to find that such attention to detail exposed real bugs.

Calling such a practice `slavish' is neither accurate, nor
particularly complimentary.

> breaks the ability to copy&paste
> between a .c file and a .h file. IMO it would be better to fix 'indent'

I think cpp indentation should be the same in .c and .h files,
and that the indentation should always reflect the level of nesting.

> so that it doesn't do things like this:
>
>>  #ifndef _ALLOCA_H
>> -#define _ALLOCA_H
>> +# define _ALLOCA_H
>
> If GCC knows the typical one-inclusion-only pattern of .h files, why
> shouldn't 'indent' know about it as well?