Tabs/spaces in patches (was: Patch to gfortran PR 15314)

[Paul Brook]

On Sunday 16 May 2004 07:37, Victor Leikehman wrote:
> Paul,
>
> You wrote:
> > - The tabs in your patches seem to get coverted to spaces. This isn't a
> > major problem, but makes them harder to apply. Maybe you could tweak your
> > client to preserve them, or send patches as attachments.
>
> I am a little bit confused about this --  I was under impression that
> GNU coding standards require using spaces instead of tabs.  This is why
> I configured my emacs to use spaces by setting indent-tabs-mode to nil.
> Now your message implies that tabs shoudl be preserved... Please help.

GCC convention is that hard tabs should be used, with a width of 8.
There only seems to be anecdotal evidence of this, not is actually 
documentation.

Discussions on this tend to end up as flamewars, but the general consensus 
seems to be "It's not ideal, but we're going to keep using tabs anyway".

Paul