[Openembedded-architecture] Consistent white-space indentation in metadata layers

[Richard Purdie]

On Wed, 2017-05-03 at 21:50 +0100, Phil Blundell wrote:
> I also agree that making this change to oe-core doesn't seem like it
> would be a dramatic upheaval.  There seem to be 302 .bb files and 75
> classes containing tabs in their shell fragments (which is a bit
> under half the total of each) and I can't see any reason why they
> couldn't be safely replaced in an automated way.  And it probably is
> true that oe-core has undergone more disruptive changes than this in
> the last five years without any severe consequences.  No doubt any
> reformatting of this kind would cause some short-term hassle for
> people backporting patches to older branches or maintaining their own
> patches on top of upstream oe-core, but both these activities are
> already fairly miserable occupations and I doubt this extra grief
> would really move the needle in terms of level of overall suffering.
>  And even if it did, they'd get over it.

Speaking as someone who has had to deal with this before, and handle
backports over various changes, I do believe the whitespace changes
will be more of a pain than normal due to the size of the codeblock
that changes, making it harder to isolate the 'real' differences.

I have done this for the python whitespace changes, things like the
getVar improvements and with others and I think the shell changes would
be by far the most disruptive.

It certainly can be done (as can most things), I've not felt a
particular need to put the stable maintainers through that pain though.
They do a pretty thankless task already without adding to the issues.

> On the other hand, I can't help feeling that anybody who finds it all
> that difficult to cope with the difference in whitespace conventions
> between oe-core and meta-oe is possibly in the wrong job.  These two
> trees are, after all, distinct codebases, maintained by different
> individuals, and the fact that they happen to use the same tools
> should not necessarily oblige them to use the same indentation
> style. 
> 
> But on the third hand, given that the arguments for preferring spaces
> over tabs are fairly weak, given also that meta-oe has fewer users
> than oe-core, and given finally that meta-oe was the project which
> originally went off-piste by disregarding the TSC recommendation on
> formatting, overall I think my view is that oe-core should probably
> stay as it is and meta-oe should either adapt itself to match or just
> resign itself to being different.

One of the reasons I've not pushed this for as long is that I still
worry about the precedent that meta-oe set in doing this. A TSC
decision was ignored and no action was taken. If we now decided to
change/overrule/replace the TSC decision, it does continue a dangerous
precedent.

For comparison, if we discuss this here and the outcome is that its
decided OE-Core should change, say ultimately through a TSC vote, then
I as the OE-Core maintainer simply ignore the patches, what happens?
There are all kinds of interesting ways that could end. My instinct so
far has been to avoid the topic.

There is also no particular reason to believe that meta-oe would abide
by any decision other than to change to use spaces based on the past.

Its a horrible situation, doesn't help our users but I don't see a good
way out of it.

> Of course, I am not an oe-core maintainer which makes my opinion
> fairly irrelevant.  But you asked, so there it is :-)

I appreciate you sharing your viewpoint, its pretty similar to my own
so I'm not alone, thanks.

Cheers,

Richard