Re: Minor windows-NT/README update for Cygwin

[Paul Edwards]

"Derek Robert Price" <derek@ximbiot.com> wrote in message 
news:mailman.743.1059597418.8231.bug-cvs@gnu.org...
> > Another good reason to remove tabs from the CVS source code
> >
> >rather than making every code submitter in the world do
> >(something unspecified).
>
> Actually, getting the tabs into an email without MIME isn't so hard in
> general, I think.  I diff to a file, then open the file with my email
> client and cut and paste from there.

When I do a code change on Unix, it is a laborious process
for me to ftp to windows instead of cutting and pasting from
my terminal.  And even after that, I'd still need ot cut and
paste from notepad into Lotus Notes to send to my home
account.  Assuming cutting and pasting is even acceptable,
I don't know how to use Lotus Notes any other way, although
I'm sure if I spent time investigating I could.  Even then I
still need to cut and paste from outlook express's email into
a newsgroup posting.  Although once again, with investigation,
maybe, just maybe, it will preserve the tabs.  Maybe.

Or, we could just use spaces.

> As for the subject of tabs in general, I usually prefer them to spaces.
> I can change my tabstop on a short term to "compress" the indentations
> and make viewing easier.

Well, you're probably in less than 1% of programmers who change
the tab settings.  Yes, that is a theoretical advantage of using tabs,
I agree.

But having seen printouts of code reviews at work (we can't
print on Unix for some reason), and files are ftped to Windows,
then put into Word, then printed out, the use of tabs makes
the code reviews painful.

Any theoretical advantage of sophisticated temp tab-resizing is
completely swamped by the 99% of programmers who are really
making a pigs meal of it and stuffing up patches (you saw posts
in here recently about patches not applying, I think due to tab
differences???).  Certainly I've had them fail because of that.
And I like to send patches to people via Lotus Notes, but I know
they can't use them automatically, they have to do the code
changes manually because the tabs have disappeared.

> What I can't stand is the combination of spaces and tabs that CVS uses
> for indentation.

I think the word problems above are due to this mixing.

> Changing the tabstop setting in an editor still mucks
> up the view since those last four spaces sometimes fail to resize
> themselves.

Life with spaces is much easier.

Alternatively, since you're in less than 1% of programmers anyway,
can't you use indent/detab to keep CVS tabless, and then if you
really want to do this tab-temp-resize, then have some sort of a
script that auto-indents to include tabs, you do your stuff, then it
auto-indents back?

It sure would be good to see the back of tabs.  BTW, we use a
tab size of 4 at work (mixed tabs/spaces), and unfortunately CVS
uses 8, so I have to go and change between them, it's annoying.

Spaces are so much nicer.

If the gods hadn't meant for us to have space, they would have
filled it up with furniture.

BFN.  Paul.