[Koha-devel] Tab stops in source code

[Mason James]

On 2008/11/14, at 2:50 AM, Paul POULAIN wrote:

> Rick Welykochy a écrit :
>> Mason James wrote:
>>
>>> but i think we might have to allow either tabs or spaces from  
>>> developers -
>>> (thats perltidys behavior too afaik)
>>
>> Why would anyone indent with spaces?



check this link for hearty examples of 'tabs versus spaces'  
discussion, enjoy ;)

http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=576936


for me, the above discussion eventually has a obvious conclusion,  
which is...

   tabs have the possibility to be displayed in a whole bunch of  
different ways
   depending on what os/shell/editor/termtype/xterm/whatever  
combination you are using

and spaces dont,..


i think spaces continue to be the best 'lowest-common-denominator'  
choice for a big open-source project like koha,



>
> we spoke of that a loonnnggg time ago.
> I don't remember the details, but i remember that I've changed my  
> way of
> indenting from tab to spaces.
> And since then all commits are done with spaces, I think the tab ones
> are oldies that have never be fixed.
>
>>> the important thing is a consistent indent length of 4, i think.
>>
>> Hooray for that!
>
> yep.
>
>> And what about the templates? They are often mind-bending to edit,  
>> and I've
>> seen no tools to assist in comprehending their structure.
>
> agreed...


yep

i had a look about 2.5 years ago at 'htmltidy' to help format the  
templates, but i hit a bit of problem

the problem was that htmltidy doesnt understand the <!-- TMPL_*** -->  
tags, so it cant properly format the file
the best it can do is ignore the tags, and not give a parse-error :/

so, it still has it uses for tiding a messy template file, but the  
indentation needs to be done manually after the parse
but still, better than nothing...


there was a work-in-progress mod for HTML::Template support in htmltidy,
but i cant spot it in the current cvs tree ( i may have missed it )

http://tidy.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/tidy/tidy/


has there been any better html-type pretty-printer projects since,  
people???
or is htmltidy still the closest thing we have for this task


it would be a very big win if we could find a tool to help  
standardise the templatefiles format,
and tidy up the messy existing files too


its been ages since i last looked at htmltidy, so its worth another  
look,
even just to check on the (non)progress of the HTMPL::Template  
handling code


FYI: heres the link http://tidy.sourceforge.net/


Mason.