* Tue 2007-10-16 Michael Witten <mfwitten AT MIT.EDU> Spaces are guaranteed to interpreted correctly in all environments. TABs are the source of too many problems. Jari -- Welcome to FOSS revolution: we fix and modify until it shines -
No. Tabs are 8 spaces wide. Live with it. It's the only sane solution. The fact is, people do mix the two. No ifs, buts or maybes about it. Even in the absense of any actual *spaces*, the size of a tab matters, since you can - and do - have two separately indented things (the initial indentation, and then things like comments being indented separately). The only sane solution is the one the kernel and git have always used: tabs are 8 spaces wide, and anybody who disagrees can go screw themselves. If you don't have 8-character tabs, you *will* get odd indentation. And no, the answer is not to say "don't use tabs at all" and replace them by spaces. The answer is *also* not "tabs are just for initial code indents", because not only will most sane editors never even show the difference, it's simply not how people work. So such a rule about invisible things doesn't work. People who want to be contrary, and have a 2-character-wide tab only have themselves to blame. It's THEIR problem, not somethign that is even worth trying to address. If there are problems with people having small screens, that is damn well not about TAB, it's about code being way too deeply indented, and smaller indents are absolutely *not* the answer - they are part of the damn problem to begin with. The fact that some projects have encouraged bad coding style and *insane* tab values is not a git problem. We should teach people to do *better*, not become worse just because others have done idiotic things. Linus -
Unfortunately, it leads to some problems. For example, you can type:
git blame alloc.c
2c1cbec1 (Linus Torvalds 2007-04-16 22:10:19 -0700 21) #define DEFINE_ALLOCATOR(name, type) \
855419f7 (Linus Torvalds 2006-06-19 10:44:15 -0700 22) static unsigned int name##_allocs; \
100c5f3b (Linus Torvalds 2007-04-16 22:11:43 -0700 23) void *alloc_##name##_node(void) \
855419f7 (Linus Torvalds 2006-06-19 10:44:15 -0700 24) { \
855419f7 (Linus Torvalds 2006-06-19 10:44:15 -0700 25) static int nr; \
and see that the end of line 23 does not look right. Because of that,
I prefer tabs for initial code indents and spaces in other places. Of
course, my preferences are irrelevant when it comes to someone else's
project, and I can easily use whatever style it takes to get things
done. It is just that "use tabs elsewhere and everything will be fine
as long as you have the standard tab setting" is not exactly correct.
The rest is people's preferences and habits...
Dmitry
-It is insane to *require* diciplined people to use tabs for more than code indents. If you insist on using tabs all over the place - fine with me. But do not frown upon me and other diciplined people becasue we use spaces to make sure our arguments to a function call is properly aligned in a tab=10,tab=8,tab=2 environment. The arguments "tabs are always 8 spaces properly aligned" is just to reach the lowest common denominator around developers. And frankly there are some that do better than that. The root casue are the stupid editors that does not make it easy to be diciplined and thats where the errors come from and all the stupid rules like the above. Sam -
Actually, part of the mess with tabs is due to the fact they're not exactly 8 spaces wide, but any width that ends at a multiple of 8 characters from the start of the line. So 0 <= n < 8 spaces and a tab is still 8 spaces. Anyways, it's maybe just simpler to run indent before sending patches. Mike -
Umm.. That's the definition of "tab width". The tab width is 8. Not "0 < n <= 8". Not "depends on where you are". The tab width is 8. The whole history of tab is that it comes from mechanical "tab stops" that you could set, and that were independent of the text - pressing the tab key would move to the next tab stop. Now, those tab stops were movable, and in fact, I think lots of terminals still support setting those tab stops dynamically (ie you can send control sequences to set their "tab stops" to different points, exactly like an old mechanical typewriter). But when it comes to computers, 8-character wide tab stops is the de-facto standard. It's what every single terminal defaults to. It's the only thing that some printers/terminals support. Anything else is by definition non-standard. Linus -
Read better before replying, and I'm sure you'll agree with Mike ... -- Matthieu -
Side note: one reason you *have* to use 8-character wide tab stops if you want to be sane is that while your editor may have alternate tab-stops, but when you look at the sources any other ways or on any other setup, the default is *always* going to be that 8-character wide tab-stop. Do a "git cat-file -p :Makefile", and it will default to using "less". Have you added "-x2" to you LESS environment variable? Has everybody else? Not likely. Or what happens when you just cat it straight, without any less at all? In short: using anything but 8-char wide tab-stops is INSANE, because it will inevitably showing the same source code in different ways depending on which editor or other environment you use. In contrast, if you just accept that 8-wide tabs are a fact, you never see any of these issues. Everything "just works". Linus -
I'm reading two different ideas here, and it seems like you're conflating the two — and, in the process, telling some pretty smart people (smarter than me, anyhow) to go fuck themselves. If a project uses tabs, your statement regarding 8-char-width tabs makes sense; you need some rule by which you can assume others are viewing the same thing you are. But you then dismiss out of hand the option of using all spaces; Python has been getting along perfectly well for quite some time by following this rule, and my experience with the language leads me to believe it's the wiser of the choices. Questions over tab width simply *go away*; you pick an indentation level (Python uses 4) and stick with it. I'm not arguing that git should switch to all spaces; projects tend to become set in their ways, and consistency can be valuable. I'm merely pointing out that all-spaces is a quite *sane* option, even if it's one git doesn't choose. -
I do indeed. I don't think it's sensible. And I did think I already answered that issue by talking about how most editors don't even support it or show the difference between tabs and spaces. For example, the editor I use - microemacs - supports tabs just fine. It does auto-indentation etc. But it does it with hard-tabs by default, so now you have to have some editor-specific setup for that particular project if you ever want to do anything else. And that's really what it boils down to. Everybody support 8-character hardtabs (and usually by default). They may support other things *too*, but any time you move away from that standard behaviour, you'll most likely find something that doesn't support the alternatives. So yes, the answer really is: "git uses 8-character hard-tabs, live with it". Linus -
On Tue, 16 Oct 2007 16:05:34 -0700 (PDT) Unfortunately most editors are totally confused about the difference between tab size and indentation level. Visual Studio, probably the most commonly used development environment on Windows, by default uses TAB characters that are 4 spaces wide, and users are recommended not to change that because of that a lot of existing Windows source code and examples uses those settings. Two years ago, when I last looked at it, Eclipse, a very commonly used development environment, managed to confuse tabs and indentation and make it almost impossible to write Java or C code with a tab size of 8 with a different indentation level. The Eclipse 3 betas did see some improvement there, I think it got possible to do the right thing in Java at least, but the normal text editor and C editor lagged behind. But it was still a big mess and it was much too easy for someone to get a tab size which is not 8. Hopefully this has been fixed by now, but I wouldn't bet any significant amount of money on it. Nedit (which runs on Linux) has a very confusing settings dialog with terms such as "tab spacing", "emulated tabs". I guess emulated tabs means the indentation level, but guess how easy that is to mess up. gedit can control the tab width, but has no setting at all for configuring the indentation level. Guess what people do when they want a 4 space indentation level? Yes, right, change the tab size to 4. A a former colleague who used visual slickedit usually produced code with tab size 4. I think I've gotten the same crap from ultra edit 32 users. And so on... Mercifully, _all_ of these editors have a setting to use spaces instead of tabs, and telling people to turn on that setting is the absolutely easiest way of making things "just work". Yes, I know, the correct answer is to tell people to always use tab size 8, and I frequently and loudly do that. But at the same time, perfect is the enemy of good. It's much easier to explain "tabs will act dif...
One issue may well be that Windows programmers also probably don't work very much with patches, do they? One reason for *really* wanting to use hard-tabs is that it makes patches look better, exactly because diffs contain that one extra (or two, in the case of old-style context diffs) character at the beginning of the line. Which means that while all-space indents look fine, *mixing* styles definitely does not. In particular, a two-character indent (which hopefully nobody uses, but people are crazy) will be totally unreadable as a patch if you have the (fairly common, at least in UNIX projects) style of using spaces for less-than-eight-character-indents and tabs for the full 8 characters. (In particular, a 3-level and 4-level indent will look *identical* in such a project, when using context diffs). And sure, you can use all-spaces-everywhere, but that just isn't what any normal UNIX editors are set up for by default. In contrast, under UNIX, I can pretty much guarantee that hard-tab indents look at least reasonable in any editor. And if you have an editor that shows hard-tabs as 4-character indents, generally you can work with it. You may have odd indentation, and people may complain about your patches not lining up, and yes, it would be up to *you* to understand that 8-wide tabs are the normal and default. But you can certainly work with a source base that uses a single hard-tab for indentation. In contrast, if you use spaces (or worse - mixing), things really look ugly as sin, to the point of actually being unworkable. In short: - if the project has the rule that an indentation is "one hard-tab", then at least everybody can *work* with that project. Different people may see things laid out slightly differently, but it's generally not a horrible disaster, especially if you aim to use block comments indented with the code (like we *mostly* do both in the kernel and in git) - all-space and all-tabs just leads to problems. Y...
It's unreasonable not to list that anywhere. mfwitten -
Heh. I was sure we had a "CodingStyle", but it turns out that no, we don't, and yes, the 8-tab assumption is implicit in (a) the kernel rules (which git started out following for obvious reasons, and which *does* have documentation making this very explicit indeed) and (b) those few places where you can actually see it in the result. So maybe it should be made explicit. You can see the effect right now by doing git grep -1 ' ' *.c (again, that regex is a "tab+space", although it's not obvious) and then looking for places where we line up things in ways that simply wouldn't have worked if it wasn't a 8-wide tab, ie things like ... check_all_attr = xrealloc(check_all_attr, sizeof(*check_all_attr) * attr_nr); .. read_tree_recursive(args->tree, args->base, plen, 0, args->pathspec, write_zip_entry); .. where the arguments wouldn't line up for anything but 8-char-wide tabs. (But the code is certainly *readable* with other tab sizes, so it's not like this makes it impossible to work if somebody has a 4-space tab, it just means that such people can get odd effects - but they may not even realize that others see things line up!) Linus -
I'm late in this game. But it's too classic a debate to miss the fun. Yes, all-space would look fine in patches. It'll look better than all tabs for tables and ascii formula and diagrams in comments, as one prepended character could screw up the tabs (depending on the content), rendering them totally unreadable. In all-space case, things just shift to the right by one character column. I believe the indentation convention for ruby is 2 spaces. It looks But all-space would look perfect in any editor as the authors intended, including the tables and ascii arts, as long as it's using monospace font. It's easy to setup all space editing on all platforms (Windows, Mac, *nix) It's also much easier to enforce. I've used pre- commit hook to check for tabs in the source and reject them if a tab But I still haven't seen any compelling arguments against the "all space" case, other than "people will screw it up into mixed spaces", which is really a straw man, as many multi-platform projects enforced the all-space policy easily by using a pre-commit hook in maintainers' repository. The only downside of all-space is a moderate space bloat in source, which is insignificant, all things considered. I agree that "8-character tabs are the gold standard", only for the tabstop==8 part but not the indent==tab part. For me the question is: is it really so unreasonable to just say "all-space is the holy grail"? __Luke -
Overhead!
If you use 8 spaces instead of one tab,
that's using up 7x more space!
Consider:
# calculates the extra space required to
# use the given number of spaces/tab.
size()
{
count=`grep -RIo "\`printf \"\t\"\`" . | wc -l`;
perl -e "print $count*$(($1-1))/1024/1024 . \" MB\n\"";
}
Then in in a git working tree:
size 8; # 1.28701210021973 MB
size 4; # 0.551576614379883 MB
In a linux kernel working tree:
size 8; # 61.4902725219727 MB
size 4; # 26.3529739379883 MB
Conclusion:
Yikes!
I hate tabs, but I can't argue with that!
Michael Witten
-As already pointed out, this isn't the true waste. Run the following
Ruby script to determine the true waste:
------------ cut here -----------
TabWidth = 8
actual_size = 0
expanded_size = 0
ARGF.each_line do |line|
width = 0
line.each_byte do |byte|
width += (byte == ?\t) ? (TabWidth - (width % TabWidth)) : 1
end
actual_size += line.length
expanded_size += width
end
puts (expanded_size - actual_size).to_s
------------ cut here -----------
This will give you the actual space waste. Run it like so:
% ruby space-waste.rb /usr/src/linux/**/*.[ch]
(or in a similar manner that doesn't fail due to going over the
maximum command-line limit).
According to this calculation the waste is 47808782 bytes, or about
45.6 MiB, for 8-spaces-wide tabs.
-I concede my calculation was crude.
Interestingly, modifying my calculation to look
for tabs at the beginning of the line gives a
similar result:
# calculates the extra space required to
# use the given number of spaces/tab.
size()
{
count=`grep -RIo "^\`printf \"\t\"\`" . | wc -l`;
perl -e "print $count*$(($1-1))/1024/1024 . \" MiB\n\"";
}
size 8; => 49.7416791915894 MiB
and for git:
size 8; => 1.25082969665527 MiB
Anyway, thanks for the neat script.
mfwitten
-First, the overhead is not a simple x4 or x8 conversion in size, but it's the upper bound. Given that, let's look at the percentage of the overhead: my git working tree is 56MB after gc, so the overhead is Now, compile the kernel, do a du in the tree and report back percentages of the overhead. Disk is cheap (1GB costs less than half a dollar), people's productivity/time is not. The overhead argument is compelling, not! __Luke -
But we also established that an all-space model is not stable, because any Hell no, it's not. More importantly, I can guarantee that certain developers will refuse to be part of such a project with such an idiotic design that eats disk-space Hey, you start your own projct, and you can enforce whatever idiotic rules you want to. But in the meantime, all-tab indentations are equally good, and are the defacto rule. So *you* are the one who should show compelling arguments for changing, and so far you haven't shown any. Really: what is the problem with hardtabs? Absolutely none. Linus -
Hi, Yes. Me, for one. But heck, _everyone_ is free to fork. That is one of the missions of git: "fork!". You can maintain you tab-less fork, until people flock to you, deciding to use your repo instead of Junio's, or Shawn's. If enough people decide, you will have more followers than the others. Ciao, Dscho -
In what way does an all-space model cause people to accidentally add tabs, but an all-tab model does not cause people to accidentally add spaces? -Peff -
It happens. We do de-spacification in the kernel occasionally when it is an annoyance. Usually it shows up in patches, though - exactly because code which adds spaces instead of tabs won't line up correctly in the diff. So it doesn't matter *which* one you use (all spaces or all tabs) in that sense. But clearly tabs are *way* more common at least in any UNIX project, and tabs really do have the advantage of being smaller. And smaller *is* faster. Do something like this on the kernel: GIT_PAGER= time git grep sched_fair and then do the same thing with the kernel sources blown up by 20% by de-tabification. Guess which one is 20% slower? And whoever said that disk space doesn't matter doesn't know what he is talking about. Disk space most *definitely* matters. Do the above test with a cold-cache case, and think what 20% more IO does to you (or 20% less disk cache). But no, the size issues are secondary, I'm not claiming anything else. Although I do suspect that historically, they have been primary, and have been the thing that has resulted in the fact that tabs are so commonly used. Linus -
You have made this claim several times, and I really don't understand it. If I have 8 spaces, then a diff line will have either " ", "+", or "-" followed by 8 spaces. If I use a hard tab, then the tab will end up only taking up 7 spaces because of the nature of tabs. This might matter if I'm comparing non-diff code to diff code. But in a diff, _everything_ is indented by exactly one space, so it all lines up. Yes, I agree with that (even with an all-tabs policy, there are still mangled and incorrect patches that come in -- and the maintainer rejects or fixes them). Which was what I was trying to point out with my question (though I was also curious to hear your answer): all-space versus all-tab is largely a matter of preference. And that means that people who want git to change I was about to tell you that you're full of it, but there really is a slowdown: $ cd linux-2.6 $ GIT_PAGER= time git grep sched_fair >/dev/null 0.34user 0.94system 0:01.30elapsed 98%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k 0inputs+0outputs (0major+7548minor)pagefaults 0swaps $ find . -name .git -prune -o -type f | xargs perl -pi -e 's/\t/ /g' $ git-commit -a -m de-tabify $ git-repack -a -d $ GIT_PAGER= time git grep sched_fair >/dev/null 0.42user 1.06system 0:01.54elapsed 96%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k 0inputs+0outputs (0major+7591minor)pagefaults 0swaps It's actually about 16%. Gah, I can't believe I've not only been sucked into a tab vs spaces discussion, but now I've actually wasted time doing a performance comparison on it. As an aside, that commit was enough to trigger a "git-gc --auto", which was my first experience with it. It's actually kind of annoying (especially since I was about to repack -a -d). -Peff -
if the code uses a tab and the patch uses 8 spaces the two will not line up in the diff becouse in the diff output the tab is 'only 7 spaces; useing one or the other isn't the problem, it's the mixing of the two. David Lang -
Yes, obviously. The people who advocate mixing really _are_ objectively wrong. But I was talking about all-spaces versus all-tabs. -Peff -
If you really are all one-or-the-other, then everything is obviously fine, and spaces have somewhat stronger guarantees (I say "somewhat", because the line-up-guarantee of all-spaces is only guaranteed with fixed-width fonts, and hard-tab indents often look nicer in printouts, and are generally much more flexible in just how wide you make the indent *look*, ie hard-tabs at least *allow* people to see the indents in different ways, even if that will potentially mess up any alignment). But some mixing is inevitable, and at least in UNIX, the tendency is for tabs, not spaces, by default, so tabs have a much higher chance of *staying* mostly tabs, while anybody who uses spaces pretty much *will* get tabs inserted by just about any programming editor that isn't set up for python. So you always get _some_ amount of mixing, exactly because most editors won't show you the difference, and what people aren't aware of, they don't think about. There's no getting away from that, unless you actually enforce it with hooks (and in a distributed environment, even that isn't really going to fly, is it?). And if you *do* decide to enforce it with hooks, you now have issues like the fact that some files mustn't do it (autoconvert tabs to spaces in a Makefile, and it just stops working!), and others have somewhat subtle issues forcing your converter to be somewhat knowledgeable (trivial example: strings that are spread across multiple lines in C..) In general, if you do enforce it (which I personally think is not likely a good idea, but hey, it's up to the project), I'd *still* suggest going the way of enforcing hard-tabs, not spaces. As mentioned, space does matter, but hardtabs really are "friendlier", and if you're a vi user, you can do a :set tabstop=4 and if that's what you're used to, it will all look better to you. In contrast, all-spaces just sucks. It really has no redeeming values. Linus -
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 -
Well, you actually touched every files in the tree, and there are about 22K of them. this, plus the tree objects leading to them, your commit certainly did create an unusual amount of loose objects. Repacking them will inevitably take a wile. Nicolas -
Yes, I know. I wasn't complaining so much about the speed, but rather the behavior of "git-gc" running while I was in the middle of trying to accomplish something else (I hadn't seen it before, because I generally keep my repos fairly packed). -Peff -
But if you are trying to say that my case is pathological, then yes. -Peff -
Yes.
You're missing the fact that some people have problems with editors.
So they add a line, and they add *that* line with the wrong kind of
indentation. And it shows up among the other lines like this (here the
whole patch is indented):
diff --git a/kernel/sched.c b/kernel/sched.c
index 92721d1..1ecb164 100644
--- a/kernel/sched.c
+++ b/kernel/sched.c
@@ -127,6 +127,7 @@ static inline u32 sg_div_cpu_power(const struct sched_group *sg, u32 load)
static inline void sg_inc_cpu_power(struct sched_group *sg, u32 val)
{
sg->__cpu_power += val;
+ wrong indentation here.
sg->reciprocal_cpu_power = reciprocal_value(sg->__cpu_power);
}
#endif
and so you see the fact that somebody messed up in the patch itself.
It actually more often goes the other way: somebody may have messed up
earlier, but did so *consistently* so it wasn't obvious when looking at
the patch. And then somebody fixes one line, and now that one fixed line
is indented correctly but differently.
When it gets *too* bad, we just reindent the whole file, but more
commonly when I notice it in a diff, I just edit that particular region
or even just the diff itself in-place.
Generally, it seldom comes to even that. Doing a
git grep ' ' -- '*.c'
(that's now eight spaces) returns quite a lot of lines, and it's generally
not worth worrying about (not all of them are indentation - people do use
spaces for lining things up etc - but a lot of it really is just indents
I didn't even time it, and I called it at 20% without even counting any
tabs. Why? Because it's inevitable!
It so happens that "grep" has a lot of really clever heuristics, so that
it is actually better at passing over characters that it knows cannot
start the pattern you are searching for, so timing "grep" is actually
quite complex in the general case. So I bet that if you had grepped for
something that started with a space, you'd probably have found a bigger
slowdown.
But ig...Oh. I thought you meant "if you have an all-spaces policy, your diffs will not look good." But what you meant was "when people screw up your policy by mixing tabs and spaces, your diffs will not look good." And that applies equally, whether they are screwing up your all-tabs or all-spaces setup (and I remain convinced that no matter what your policy, people _will_ screw it up). Yes. I wondered whether the increased size would really matter here, or if it would get lost in the noise of program startup and other No, it's not a waste. In the grand scheme of things, I don't actually care that much about the result, but hey, I think I may be the only It would have been nicer if it said something like "Your repository looks crufty. Running git-gc --auto..." using whatever terms users would be comfortable with. Instead, it just started with "Counting objects" and a long wait. I happen to know what that means, but I'm not sure how a git newbie would react (though it looked _much_ nicer because of Nico's recent terser progress patches). -Peff -
--- And as an added bonus, we can tell people how to turn off automatic GC and how to invoke it by hand. builtin-gc.c | 4 ++++ 1 files changed, 4 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-) diff --git a/builtin-gc.c b/builtin-gc.c index 23ad2b6..b1159d6 100644 --- a/builtin-gc.c +++ b/builtin-gc.c @@ -211,6 +211,10 @@ int cmd_gc(int argc, const char **argv, const char *prefix) prune = 0; if (!need_to_gc()) return 0; + fprintf(stderr, "Packing your repository for optimum " + "performance. If you would rather run\n" + "\"git gc\" by hand, run \"git config gc.auto 0\" " + "to disable automatic cleanup.\n"); } if (pack_refs && run_command_v_opt(argv_pack_refs, RUN_GIT_CMD)) -- 1.5.3.rc2.4.g726f9 -
I'm not sure telling the users how to disable it every time it shows up is a good idea. gc --auto exists for the naive user, and suggesting they turn it off each time it happens will just result in... people turning it off, leading back to the performance issues that caused the feature to be installed in the first place. Perhaps a message more along the lines of "To avoid this, run "git gc" manually on a regular basis. See 'git help gc' for more information." ~~ Brian -
This is indeed a good point. And for those who start repacking manually then the automatic repacking will very rarely trigger, reducing the need for turning automatic repacking off anyway. Nicolas -
That's a good point. Jeff / Shawn, do you agree with that? I'll come up with an alternate patch if so. -Steve -
Arrgh. I already have the original patch in this thread in my master so I can't rewind it. But yes, the argument Brian is making above makes a lot of sense and I like his proposed message even better than what I've already applied. A patch against spearce/master to revert the prior message and insert something that is perhaps more reasonable would be most appreciated. -- Shawn. -
The previous message had too much of a "boy, you should
really turn off this annoying gc" flair to it. Instead,
let's make sure the user understands what is happening, that
they can run it themselves, and where to find more info.
Suggested by Brian Gernhardt.
Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
---
Geez, you really _are_ the maintainer now, prodding your minions to
write trivial patches for you. :) I don't see any point in reverting the
other patch separately, since we can just improve the message.
I tried not to use the word "avoid" since I think we don't want to imply
that auto-gc sucks. It doesn't, but some people might prefer to run it
manually, and we should let them know it's an option. I'm open to
wording improvements.
builtin-gc.c | 6 +++---
1 files changed, 3 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)
diff --git a/builtin-gc.c b/builtin-gc.c
index f99b212..3a2ca4f 100644
--- a/builtin-gc.c
+++ b/builtin-gc.c
@@ -206,9 +206,9 @@ int cmd_gc(int argc, const char **argv, const char *prefix)
if (!need_to_gc())
return 0;
fprintf(stderr, "Packing your repository for optimum "
- "performance. If you would rather run\n"
- "\"git gc\" by hand, run \"git config gc.auto 0\" "
- "to disable automatic cleanup.\n");
+ "performance. You may also\n"
+ "run \"git gc\" manually. See "
+ "\"git help gc\" for more information.\n");
} else {
/*
* Use safer (for shared repos) "-A" option to
--
1.5.3.4.1249.g895be-dirty
-Heh. But didn't I just post a different trivial patch to the I agree. No point in pissing in the snow multiple times over a simple language change. I was perhaps a little too aggressive in applying Steven's first patch. Which I also now see git-am actually split the From line incorrectly and doesn't actually show Steven's I think what you have is many times better. It doesn't tell the user that they can prevent having this activate at the wrong time by just running git-gc every so often, but if the message (and the subsequent packing itself) is annoying they'll read the manual -- Shawn. -
Yes, I tried many wordings of "this is annoying and you want to avoid it," but explaining the situation takes way too much time for such a commonly seen message. And I think some people will actually prefer it that way. BTW, the git-gc manpage needs some cleanup. Patches to follow. -Peff -
Yes, that seems reasonable. I think the most important thing is that they realize that "git-gc" is responsible for what is happening. That should allow them to find more information in the documentation if they want (and Brian's suggestion points directly to the documentation, which is great). -Peff -
I like it, especially with the new progress patches. -Peff -
Me too. Its in my tree now. :-) -- Shawn. -
Sigh... Forgot to add: Signed-off-by: Steven Grimm <koreth@midwinter.com> -
Damn unix developers! They just can't be controlled! ... seriously now. You're trying on one hand to enforce a particular indentation rule (use tabs for indentations, assume tabs are 8 characters wide, use spaces for partial indentation) — which assumes unix developers *can* follow a project's rules for coding style — and yet you're arguing *against* all-spaces because unix developers *can't* follow rules. Interesting how you waver between "certain developers" and "me". I'm convinced at this point that your argument comes down to "I can't use my favorite text editor with all-spaces, therefore all-spaces sucks". As for *disk space*? When we can measure cheap drives in sizable Yeah, can you believe some projects actually *survive* with an Problems have been outlined, but since everything for you comes down to "anything that comes between me and microemacs sucks", rational discussion breaks down. Thank goodness the git community (not to mention the Linux community!) is larger than you; they exist in no small part due to your programming skill and initial open-sourcing, but certainly in *spite* of your personality otherwise. -
Well, let's put it this way: that "sample" is the one that started the project. I got to pick the license. Are you going to argue about that too? I got to pick the way I wrote the code. Are you going to continue arguing about that? The fact is, I don't see the people arguing for spaces having actually Umm. And I've *told* you that. The whole point is: - every single damn editor out there can handle tabs. - it's the default - end of story. That disk-space translates into memory usage too, and into just being technically the *inferior* choice. How hard is that to accept? If you have a choice between a technically better solution, and a technically worse one, why are you arguing for the Hey, Ḯ'm not saying that others shouldn't use spaces. I'm saying that *git* should not, the same way the Linux kernel does not and will not. Why? Because tabs are better. You (or anybody else) have simply never given any argument against that very simple argument. You try to push an Don't talk about "rational discussion", since you don't even *have* any. The starting point for any rational decision would be to explain why changing tabs to spaces would actually improve anything at all. And you have yet to show *any* such argument, while I've shown arguments to the reverse. One big one being: the person who started the project and still actually *does* something for it actually cares. In contrast, your argument seems to be "I've not actually done anything, but I want to paint the bikeshed pink". Linus -
Possibly because they do not want to cooperate :-) Anyway, it is mostly a Unix <-> the rest issue. In the Unix world all tools by default use 8-spaces per tab and although most of them can be told otherwise, nobody bothers. That way at least all code looks the same, regardless of spaces or tabs. Many editors are smart enough to create sequences N<TAB>+M<SPACE> for initial indentation to get consistent usage, but even if it isn't consistent patch and diff can be told to handle it. Outside the Unix world there appears to be little standard, so you receive files with any combination of tab distance, using tabs vs. spaces, etc. Most often I have to re-indent them before reading :-( I guess the most ideal situation is to use only tabs for initial indentation and spaces elsewhere, so changing the tab distance gets consistent layout. The drawback is that there is no room for `half indentation', so style conventions have to take care of that. Still, the main developers take the decision. If you don't like it, don't cooperate or fork. --- Jan -
The way you *wrote* the code is different from deciding how the code *should* be written — or is your code set in stone? (Funny, considering that we're talking about a revision control system here.) As for the license bit — yes, you certainly *did* get to pick the license. What's your point? We wouldn't even be having this discussion Oh, here you pull out the big stick: if you haven't already done anything for git, your ideas (as for what to, hmm, do for git) are Every single damn editor out there can handle spaces. The "default" is project-by-project. Since you're BD in git-land, yes, your say-so is ultimately That disk space translates into memory usage exactly *how*? Compiled code? Or the in-memory text while you're editing? The former can't be the issue, and the latter is trivial. And, of course, this still comes up against the *benefits* of all-spaces. Benefits which have been mentioned by several people; Because, once again, being new makes one incorrect, doesn't it? You've essentially demonstrated that git's "benevolent" dictator is an asshole, and even worse, an irrational asshole. It's one thing to deal with a community member like that; when it's the BD, I think I'll move along elsewhere. Congratulations. -
Hi, Tom, you have to contribute way more code than you did, in order to be taken seriously with statements as these. Ciao, Dscho -
If you can't overcome your dislike for tabs and accept that this is the coding style for the Git project then please go away. Can this discussion, rational or not, just stop now? Nicolas -
I notice how you didn't even list them. Why? Because they don't exist? So here's the deal: I claim that "use hard-tabs, and accept that they are 8 characters wide" is a provably working situation. For lots of *large* projects. I'm not some odd-ball person here, I bet that if you go and look at any sourceforge entry that is written in C (which is the language we're debating here), you'll find that the ones that use hard-tabs (even if they use spaces for smaller indents) are the vast majority. So what's your point? You're pushing something that is provably odd-ball, since almost nobody uses it, and you cannot even state what the huge advantages are, and you claim that I'm the one that ignores them, when it is *you* who have refused to acknowledge that there are reasons to *not* do it (one big reason being that there are current existing and productive developers that definitely do *not* want to change - and no, it wasn't just me, either). Your arguments make no sense. So *of*course* they don't sway me. And you know what? I don't much care if you aren't swayed by mine. It's to some degree a matter of taste, and the fact is, if you don't like the current git model, you can go away and play with your own model. It *is* open source, after all. Put another way: if you cannot respect the wishes of the people who have done the work, then I damn well have no reason what-so-ever to respect *yours*. Linus -
This is bloody ridiculous, but... On Wed, 17 Oct 2007 12:53:58 -0700 (PDT) I think you would get at lot less argument if you weren't so damn self righteous about it. If you'd just said "it's a matter of taste and hard tabs 8 spaces wide are the way we prefer to do it and that's the way we want to keep doing it" I'd not have any problem with it. But when you start claiming that there are no reasons to use all spaces, and that it doesn't solve any problems (it definitely does), and that all editors work with hard tabs at 8 (which they don't), at least I get a bit frustrated with you. It's very non-respectful of you to claim that everyone is stupid that doesn't agree with you and is just asking for silly arguments. Yes, I know, you're an opinionated bastard and proud of it, but maybe you should tone that down a bit. (At least I got quite insulted by your Git talk at Google. People are not stupid just because they don't agree with you, most of the time they just have different preferences or different goals.) /Christer (trying to escape from Lilliput) -
Hi, Why is it that in this thread, people whom I have heard _nothing_ of before seem to think this would be a good time to let their opinion be heard? Now, _that_ is what I call righteous. Show nothing but opinion. Ciao, Dscho -
On Wed, 17 Oct 2007 23:11:37 +0100 (BST)
I'm not that invisible am I?
cd linux-2.6.22.7
find . -type f | xargs egrep -il "weinigel" | wc -l
17
Ahh, confirmation, I really do exist. The earliest LSM entry I can find
for myself is from 1995:
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/kernel/patches/scanners/hpscan-0.1.1.5.lsm
Mmm, nostalgia. :-)
But yes, I haven't contributed anything to git so far, I mostly lurk
on the mailing list and try to keep up with what's happening to git.
In the beginning I sent a few ideas to the list (which quite sadly were
ignored), but unfortunately I've been busy with paying work to do much
with git after that. And at work we use Perforce (yuk) or Subversion
(a lot nicer than Perforce) and privately I use CVS just because I
started using CVS ten years ago and haven't bothered to change. And
when I'm free I prefer to hack on hardware or device drivers instead.
The reason I wrote my first mail in this thread is that I work in a
different environment than Linus does and wanted to share that
experience. I usually work with embedded programming, where people use
lots of different editors and in mixed environments. Some people use
Visual Studio on Windows because that's what they use for host
programming, a lot of embedded development is done in the (almost
invariably sucky) IDE that comes with the compilers for the embedded
CPU, such as Microchips MPLAB or IAR Workbench, Eclipse is becoming
quite popular for C development, Slickedit is also popular on Windows,
a colleague prefers nedit for some strange reason, and so on. In such a
heterogeneous environment the easiest way to make sure that people see
the same indentation in all editors is to just tell them to use spaces
for indentation, and I think that every editor I just mentioned has a
setting to do that automatically. Microemacs is the odd one out in
that it doesn't support it. And my employers haven't really been
paying me to go on a crusade for the holy TAB is 8 spaces cause, the...Hi, File or directory not found. We are not Linux specific here. Besides, I was talking about _git_ source I wonder why you have to leave your hideout and comment on the source code of _git_, then. I mean, why do _you_ care? (It should have become apparent to you that _we_ care, so it looks even more like you wanted to dictate a policy on git, which you have no business with.) Puzzled, and a little unnerved, Dscho -
On Thu, 18 Oct 2007 00:44:22 +0100 (BST)
You do not have a sense of humor, do you? And you elided the paragraph
Where did I say that I'm not interested in git? If I weren't I
wouldn't have been reading this mailing list since it was first
created. The reason I don't use git is a lack of time. Professionally
I usually have no need to use git since my employer doesn't use it.
On my own time, I haven't even had time and energy to switch away from
CVS, even though I ought to have done that years ago. I dabble a bit
with git, mercurial, org bitkeeper (or did at least) when I need to
access something out on the net which is stored in such a repository,
but I haven't switched any of my projects over to using anything else.
I'm definitely interested in git, and it's interesting to read the
mailing list to see where git is going. And I'd definitely like git to
move in a direction where it's usable for me, or even better, where I
can recommend it to my (often Windows-only) colleagues.
And once again you cut out the part where I said that git is Junio's
baby, he decides what goes into the main git tree, and if he says 8
wide hard tabs, that it is. I haven't argued against that at all. So
I'm wondering why you are trying to project things I haven't
said on me.
/Christer (pissing contensts are silly, so why the hell am I getting
involved in one?)
-Because the right to an opinion is so fundamental to us that when someone claims yours is stupid for reasons you (or me, or anyone) find unfair, we stand up and say so. It's not a sign of being stupid. It's a sign of being protective about a very basic democratic right, and oss people are usually very protective about those. Freedom of everything comes easier to people than "force christianity on the world, but keep your sources open!". Linus is definitely not the most polite of people out there. Had he been less than top-ranked in the meritocracy he would have been utterly and totally annihilated on several mailing lists a really long time ago. At the same time, he's entitled to his opinion the same way everyone is, and he's entitled to express it any way he wants. When he's *really* off the mark, people will tell him so. Or ignore him totally, like an embarrassing grandfather who's just gotten too drunk at the christmas dinner and started fondling his grandsons girlfriend. However, the same goes for everyone else, and Linus *is* fond of telling people "so". If nothing else, it saves time to head off dead ends right at the start. Linus isn't sacrosankt, just enough of a corner-stone that people will keep listening to him even if he's wildly offending. tabs-vs-spaces is not, I feel, a discussion that has a great impact in the world, so being "really off the mark" is not really possible there. -- Andreas Ericsson andreas.ericsson@op5.se OP5 AB www.op5.se Tel: +46 8-230225 Fax: +46 8-230231 -
I suspect it works quite well in practice. But we've had to tweak the xdiff code before, and the hash calculations for bucket size limits. If somebody actually points out a problem case, we In general, *any* situation where you have tons of character sequences that are the same (and here it's not the characters *themselves* that have to be the same - it's the *sequence* that has to be the same, so it's not about repeating the same character over and over per se: it's about repeating a certain block of characters many many times in the source code) will be problematic for pretty much any similarity analysis. Why? Because you just have a lot of the same sequence, and to get a good delta you want to find common "sequences of these sequences" (call them supersequences) in order to find the biggest common chunk. So the badly performing cases for any delta algorithm (and I do want to point out that this has nothing what-so-ever to do with the particular one that git uses) tends to be exactly the ones where you have lots and lots of smaller chunks that match in two files, and that then makes it costlier to find the *bigger* chunks that are build up of those smaller chunks. And generally you tend to have two situations: you either (a) take *much* longer to find the common areas (they are often quadratic or worse algorithms) or (b) you decide to ignore chunks that are so common that they don't really add any real information when it comes to finding truly common chunks. Where that second choice generally means that you can miss some cases where you *could* have found a good match for deltification. In fact, usually you have a combination of the above two effects: certain deltas may be more expensive to find but there is also a limit that kicks in and means that you never spend *too* much time on finding them if the pattern space is not amenable to it. Would lots of spaces be such a pattern? I personally doubt it would really matter. In general, source c...
Hey, fair enough. I'm not very tolerant of people who haven't actually done anything, and then come in and say things should be done certain ways. The fact is, code talks, bullshit walks. And bullshit should most definitely not be encouraged. People like that should be discouraged *immediately*. I'm not interested in bikeshed painters, I think they should be told so forcefully enough that they either shut up or go away. Maybe it's a character flaw. I'll respect people who do something interesting, but re-implementing CVS (and badly, at that) or talking about syntactic changes to other peoples projects is not going to fill me with respect. In short, I'll give respect when somebody is shown to be *worth* that respect. But respect really has to be earned, not just "assumed", otherwise it's pointless. Linus -
I seem to remember somebody who started out reimplementing Unix, and badly, at that. With the help of many other people, this thing finally became portable to more than i386 and more than AT drives. Took quite a long time. The ancient floppy disk code still has the renown of being one of the worst pieces of drivers all around. Cooperation is easier if one is of the opinion rather that disrespect has to be earned: otherwise you alienate potential contributors before they even had a chance to contribute. This difference in approach is one of the things I can't help admiring in Junio. And I don't think it is to the detriment of git. -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum -
They sure as hell automatically become a lot more relevant than YOUR Yes, and they'll start mixing spaces and tabs when they auto-indent. Linus -
You are doing Junio a harsh injustice here. -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum -
Think compression. Worse yet in my opinion is the bandwidth spike that the larger tarball would create. Estimates earlier in the thread put the difference at upwards of 40MB. Disk space may be cheap, but highly available redundant mirrored disk space is not, and neither is I think what Linus is trying to say here is this: THE "BENEFITS" DO Lovely. Personal attacks are such an effective way to get your point across. You, sir, are a tool. Good riddance. -JE -