Re: [PATCH] 2.5 Documentation/CodingStyle ANSI C function declarations.

[viro@parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk]

On Fri, May 30, 2003 at 03:49:12PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 30 May 2003, Davide Libenzi wrote:
> > 
> > Talking about the code, there are still a bunch of files that uses spaces
> > with tabsize=4. Shouldn't those be reformatted with real TABs ? An emacs
> > lisp (indent+tabify) might do it pretty fast ...
> 
> I don't generally like changing syntactic stuff without a reason.
> 
> A good reason is when the original maintainer is not that active any more,
> and a new maintainer (or even just random fixer) feels that they need to
> run indent on the sources in order to make them more readable before 
> doign a fix.
> 
> It happens, but not very often. Alan and Al both do it to the files they 
> clean up. But I don't like having it done "just because" - there should be 
> a real underlying reason.

FWIW, I'd ran Lindent maybe 10 times or so - only in truly appalling cases
when it hurts just looking at the code (drivers/block/paride, mostly - just
take a look at it in 2.4).  Usually it's more of "I change that function;
might as well reindent it" and it's done manually.