[sakai-core-team] whitespace changes

[Matthew Buckett]

On 27 February 2015 at 15:03, Brian Jones <bjones86 at uwo.ca> wrote:
> I don't think we should do a massive re-write of everything to one
> standard; the history is important and if this were going to be done,
> the optimal time to do so would have been during the migration to
> Github, as Sam mentioned.

Doing a re-write of history would been very slow (and possibly hard)
as you'd probably have to checkout each revision rather than doing any
of the tricks filter-branch has on offer.

> My original inquiry was geared more towards just cleaning up a single or
> set of files that I'm working on for whatever feature I'm currently
> developing. It just makes my eyes bleed when I see files that have some
> sections using spaces, some sections using tabs, and then sometimes even
> sections with mixed tabs and spaces all in the same lines :( Maybe
> that's just my OCD...

Personally if you change >50% lines in a method I think it's
reasonable to re-indent the whole method to the same style as the rest
of the file. I don't see this as a hard rule, just a guide.

I'm with you though about having both tabs and spaces on the same
line... It's at that point I think maybe I should just turn off
whitespace highlighting for the next few hours.

> That being said, I'm all for setting a standard going forwards for any
> new files/projects being added. A standard will improve readability of
> code and assist anyone looking at a piece of code for the first time.
> Personally, I'm in favour of spaces over tabs, but we would have to have
> some sort of poll to gauge everyone's opinion.

Some reasonable standards:

https://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/javaguide.html

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/documentation/codeconvtoc-136057.html

The Eclipse default (couldn't find webpage for this).

Personally I'm not too fussed about which standard, I'm happy with the
majority, just so long as there is a formatter for it.

While we're at it what about .xml files/.html/.js/.jsp files?

-- 
  Matthew Buckett, VLE Developer, IT Services, University of Oxford