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

[Phil Blundell]

On Wed, 2017-05-03 at 17:24 +0200, Martin Jansa wrote:
> I'm writing all this because some people are still very upset about
> this,
[...]
> Opinions?

I find it quite hard to get excited about this whole issue, and I am a
bit startled to hear that there are people who are "still very upset"
about a five-year-old debate that revolves around exactly what
characters should be used to represent non-significant whitespace.  It
is hard to escape the lingering sense that there might be some element
of bikeshedding involved.  But, setting that aside...

All else being equal, I would agree with you that tabs are generally a
liability because editors vary, and they can cause diffs to end up
looking a bit strange which can be confusing.  And having a random
mixture of tabs and spaces is not a good thing.

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.

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.

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

p.