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.
I am in love with this awsome document; I love its guidelines, and coding conventions.
However, when Rust was introduced into the kernel, they butchered these beautiful guidelines, I know it’s hard to look at such heretic actions, but you have to see this:
The default settings of
rustfmtare used. This means the idiomatic Rust style is followed. For instance, 4 spaces are used for indentation rather than tabs.
How can this even relate to the ideology of the first document? I am deeply saddened by these new rules.
I know this is “The Rust experiment”, but this must be fixed before it’s too late! This has to reach someone.
A counter-argument might be:
The code should be formatted using
rustfmt. In this way, a person contributing from time to time to the kernel does not need to learn and remember one more style guide. More importantly, reviewers and maintainers do not need to spend time pointing out style issues anymore, and thus less patch roundtrips may be needed to land a change.
And to that I say that rustfmt is configurable per project, and if it isn’t, then it has to be. Doesn’t something like .editorconfig exist?
Also to advocate for a specific tab size while also advocating for hard tabs is nonsense. The one flimsy claim to usefulness tabs have is that different people can use different tab sizes and all at the low, low cost of everyone having five times more work to use tabs for indentations and spaces for alignment and thus having to use visual whitespace of some kind.
Excuse me. What does that mean? (also see my reply to 1rre)
What they’re referring to is that when you use tabs, you end up having some things at the end of lines have to be spaced over for alignment. Thus, you then have to turn on some way of seeing what stuff is tabs and what stuff is spaces and it turns into a big mess.
Hence why normal people indent with spaces instead of hard tabs
So, why don’t people just restrict tabs to pre-text, strictly-sized indentation?
On a side note: I think (not sure) that indenting with 8 or more spaces just to align 2 similar but differently sized lines of code is a bit too much.