Re: announce-gen

[Jim Meyering]

Eric Blake wrote:
> On 04/29/2011 01:51 PM, Reuben Thomas wrote:
>> I'm trying to prepare a small cosmetic patch to fix up a couple of
>> things I find myself manually fixing up:
>>
>> 1. "./NEWS". I considered replacing this with the basename of the NEWS
>> file, but in fact it seems to me it's better to use the literal "NEWS"
>> since that makes more sense in the email. What do you think?
>>
>> 2. In the email subject, better use $package_name $curr_version than
>> $my_distdir.
>>
>> I would already have sent this patch, but there's another problem: I
>> use whitespace-mode, and it stumbles because, although I've now set
>> indent-tabs-mode to t in the file announce-gen (this will be part of
>> my patch), it turns out that the file is neither one thing nor the
>> other, since although it mostly uses tabs, it doesn't use tabs in the
>> usage message, but spaces. Is there some even-more-magic setting I can
>> use which will make whitespace-mode happy to replace spaces with tabs
>> in parts of the file but not in other parts, or should I add another
>> file-local setting to turn it off?
>
> Or better yet, change indent-tabs-mode to nil, convert the file to all
> spaces (no indentation for tabs) as a separate prereq commit to your
> actual changes, thereby making that file match the style of the rest of
> gnulib (tabs as indentation only for Makefile snippets and such).

I've just done precisely that.
Thanks for bringing it up.

Hmm... vc-list-files has the same problem,
though in its case I'll convert only the leading TABs,
since some are used to align backslashes, and I have
a slight preference for TABs there.