bug#20322: 25.0.50; indent-tabs-mode should default to nil

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 04/15/2015 05:33 AM, Richard Stallman wrote:

> Tabs make file smaller.  I just did an experiment.  In lread.c, M-x
> untabify changed 139702 characters into 155402 characters, which is
> 11% bigger.

Right, I suppose that made sense, back in the day. Thanks for the context.

> For subr.el, it was smaller: 200817 characters became 209939, only
> 4.5% bigger.  However, files.el got 12% bigger.
>
> If most of a git repository is text from various versions of files,
> the repository is also likely to get around 10% bigger without tabs,
> and now you're talking about 30 meg more.

Git compresses the file contents with zlib when storing them. Let's 
compare the compressed versions of files.el:

$ gzip --keep files.el
$ gzip --keep files-notabs.el
$ ls -l files.el.gz files-notabs.el.gz
-rw-rw-r-- 1 gutov gutov 85735 Apr 12 22:26 files.el.gz
-rw-rw-r-- 1 gutov gutov 87471 Apr 15 14:07 files-notabs.el.gz

That's only a 2% increase in compressed size for the file with the 
largest difference. For subr.el, as another example, the difference is 
0.56%.