untabifying and local-variable for Emacs

[John W. Eaton]

I never saw any responses to the following message.  Does anyone have
strong objections to untabifying the Octave sources, and then
attempting to keep tabs out of the source tree in the future?

  From: "John W. Eaton" <address@hidden>
  To: octave maintainers mailing list <address@hidden>
  Subject: untabifying and local-variable for Emacs
  Date: Wed, 20 Jan 2010 22:38:41 -0500

  Some time ago, we discussed removing Emacs local-variable blocks and
  indenting source files with spaces only (no TAB characters).  At the
  time, I think we decided that it was not worth doing, in part because
  it would make transplanting patches difficult.  But now it seems that
  we are unlikely to have another 3.2.x release after the one that is in
  progress, so now seems as good a time as any, so I started making
  these changes.

  I've removed all the local-variables blocks from the C/C++ source
  files.  These changes should not cause problems with diffs because
  they are unlikely to overlap with real changes to the code.

  I've also started untabifying the C/C++ source files.  Everything
  except the src and liboctave directories should be converted now.
  Most of the files I converted are things that don't change often, so I
  don't think there will be many conflicts.  But the files in the src
  and liboctave directories are more likely to change, so I thought it
  would be best to ask whether anyone is working on any large-scale
  changes that would be affected by changes to whitespace.  If so, then
  I can wait.  Otherwise, I'd like to go ahead with the conversion.

  What about the .m files?  I'd also like to remove TAB characters from
  those files.  Is anyone working on large changes to the .m files?

  I do expect these changes will cause some small trouble, but in the
  long term I think it will be better if we are only indenting with
  spaces.

  Also, if necessary, I think it should be possible to apply a patch
  that is relative to the pre-conversion sources, by doing the
  following, given a copy of the sources that have not had TAB
  characters converted to spaces:

    make two copies of the sources
    untabify the to-be-modified files in one copy
    apply the patch to the other copy of the sources
    untabify the modified files in the patched copy
    generate a new patch

  But I'd rather not have to do that very often.

  Comments or suggestions?

  jwe