CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'm using git-svn to work on patches for issues I find in civicrm, but I'm running into an issue that when I go to save things I'm getting a lot of unrelated changes on lines. It appears to be emacs cleaning up tabs and converting them to 4 spaces.

It would be really good if the source code was consistent here, so that creating patches didn't also create other noise. Most indents seem to be 4 spaces, but there are areas where it's 2, and lines where it's tabs. Is there a pointer to a style guideline for the source code? Is there a cleanup effort planned in the future?

The three or four files that I've opened all had a few lines that were this way. Attached is a list of all the files (gzipped to get under the size requirement) in the source tree with hard tab characters in them, and the number of times they were found. I'd ignore the packages directory, as that's 3rd party code, but the rest should probably be cleaned up. I generated this with 'grep -c -I -r "^V<TAB>" * | grep -v ":0"'  (the ^V<TAB> is a litteral ctrl-v followed by the tab character in the shell) on a Linux machine.

If you wanted to automatically fix a file (assuming 4 spaces is what the indent is supposed to be) you could do the following on a Linux machine:

perl -pi -e 's/\t/    /g' FILENAME

and I think ...

grep -l -r -I "^V<TAB>" * | xargs perl -pi -e 's/\t/    /g'

Would get you a mass cleanup in one go.