On 09/16/2012 11:16 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote: > I would rather see this part left untouched. > > Your new text will force people who are not interested in using > non-standard tab width to read through the bulletted list, only to > find "The default tab width is 8". I think that is a regression in > the documentation for more common readers. > > When somebody wants to use `indent-with-non-tab` and gets offended > by the seemingly hardcoded "8" in the description, the reader has > incentive to find out if there is a way to change that 8, and will > find `tabwidth=<n>` in the same bulletted list described, with the > effect it has on both `indent-with-non-tab` and `tab-in-indent`. > > I think that should be sufficient for people who do use non-standard > tab width using tabwidth=<n>. Well, I'm not going to push the issue further than this e-mail, but I very much disagree. Please think about this: * The whole whitespace section talks generically about "spaces" and "tab characters". All of the options talk about tab in a generic way, with the one single exception of "indent-with-non-tab". * I know all about the tabwidth setting (I have it set in my configuration), but when I went looking in the whitespace documentation to try to flag a certain error I wanted to avoid, I was confused because "indent-with-non-tab" didn't do what I wanted ... instead it apparently used a hard-coded length of 8 spaces. My first thought was, well, I'd better fix THAT bug! * Of course, I did an experiment, and of course, it DOESN'T ACTUALLY DO WHAT THE DOCUMENTATION SAYS, instead it uses the tabwidth. This is good, I'm not complaining about how it works: this *is* what I want it to do. But the documentation is still wrong. * So, as you say, "the reader has incentive to find out if there is a way to change that 8". I did get incentive to find that, but it took me a few minutes of wasted time experimenting around with it, and then motived me to write a patch so that no one else will ever get confused about it again. If I've perhaps convinced you that it would be beneficial to make the documentation for this option precisely correct, but you don't like how it's worded (it's the way it is because I tried to make a very minimal change) I'd be happy to revise the patch, perhaps by changing the order of presentation of the options (e.g. mentioning tab width earlier in the section, or in some other way that you or someone may want to suggest). In any case, please, let's find some way to make the documentation both easy to read and also absolutely correct! =) -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html