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
rustfmt
are 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?
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.