On Wed, 17 Oct 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > [..] and if you're a vi user, you can do a ':set tabstop=4' btw, don't get me wrong. I think 8-char tabstops are much better, and would much prefer to really teach people not to indent too deeply (because six-deep indents really look ugly as hell with 8-char indents). So setting tabstops to smaller values is not something I think is good practice, but at least that way you can keep your dirty perversions to yourself, and don't have to admit to the world that you molest dogs and small children and use an inferior tab-stop. The rest of the world might notice occsionally when you don't hide your non-indentation tab-uses well enough, of course, but keep to block comments and spaces for non-indentation, and you'll be reasonably safe. However, if I see people actually having indentations six+ deep, I'll know that (a) you're likely a small-tab-misusing-deviant and (b) a horrible programmer. And then the tab-deviancy is the smaller problem. (Yes, we do have some cases of six+ deep indentations in the kernel. I'm happy to say that they are fairly rare, and yes, I'm personally convinced that the 8-wide indent level is part of it. It really *does* end up encouraging people to split things up and write nested cases as separate functions etc, because it simply becomes so obvious when things are going south..) Linus - 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
