On Mon, 2015-08-03 at 12:04 -0700, Tomer Barletz wrote: > I see how it makes sense to add a tab to align with the previous line > of code, as it will always look similar in all editors, no matter how > their tab character is set up to be. > However, adding more tabs will just mess up editors that are not set > up with 8-space width tabs. > > Is this a bug in checkpatch.pl, or are we saying everyone should have > their editor set to 8-spaces width tabs? from Documentation/CodingStyle: Chapter 1: Indentation Tabs are 8 characters, and thus indentations are also 8 characters. There are heretic movements that try to make indentations 4 (or even 2!) characters deep, and that is akin to trying to define the value of PI to be 3. Rationale: The whole idea behind indentation is to clearly define where a block of control starts and ends. Especially when you've been looking at your screen for 20 straight hours, you'll find it a lot easier to see how the indentation works if you have large indentations. Now, some people will claim that having 8-character indentations makes the code move too far to the right, and makes it hard to read on a 80-character terminal screen. The answer to that is that if you need more than 3 levels of indentation, you're screwed anyway, and should fix your program. In short, 8-char indents make things easier to read, and have the added benefit of warning you when you're nesting your functions too deep. Heed that warning. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
