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From: tale@cs.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence)
Newsgroups: alt.sources.d,comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: Unnecessary tar-compress-uuencodes
Message-ID: <1?T$^8#@rpi.edu>
Date: 12 Jul 90 23:43:17 GMT
References: <15652@bfmny0.BFM.COM> <3114@psueea.UUCP>
	<1990Jul10.203015.27282@eci386.uucp> <5256@plains.UUCP>
	<3124@psueea.UUCP>
Organization: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY
Lines: 22

In <3124@psueea.UUCP> kirkenda@eecs.cs.pdx.edu (Steve Kirkendall) writes:

   5) Tabs should be expanded to spaces.  The extraction program should convert
      groups of spaces back into tabs.

... only if that is from whence they came.  I extremely rarely use
tabs.  Hate 'em, in fact.  You'd have a different copy of the sources
if you just changed all groups of spaces back to tabs based on some
pre-conceived notion of what a tab width is ("8 spaces" is not always
the right answer).  In some cases this could be VERY important if you
did it inside some literal that was important to the code.  (In the
cases of patches it is not as important because patch(1) does have a
flag to ignore these sorts of differences when checking to see that an
update is right, and you could always warn people to use it.)

   6) The program that creates the archive should give a warning message when
      a file's whitespace is likely to be reformated.  For example, spaces at
      the end of a line are a no-no.

I don't think this adequately addresses the above concern.
-- 
   (setq mail '("tale@cs.rpi.edu" "tale@ai.mit.edu" "tale@rpitsmts.bitnet"))