Mon, 28 Aug 2006

Thank you for the problem report you have sent regarding Debian.

Our user manuals encourage all newcomers to the Free Software community to file bugs when they find incorrections and bugs in a package. Of course, there's always some people who take it too far (!).

Get prepared, DeFuBu challengers!

Indentation in Python is significant, since it's used to delimit blocks of code (instead of { and } in C and similar syntaxes).  Mixing tabs and spaces to indent Python code is a bug since it's ambiguous how many spaces a tab should equal, so the block delimiting is broken.

Posted by Matt Good at Tue Aug 29 00:26:13 2006

Matt - that's true, but Debian's bug tracking system is hardly the right place to be reporting problems with code style in an upstream package.

Not all users understand the difference between Debian packaging and the upstream developers, but someone knowledgeable enough to be reading the pygtk code certainly should.

Posted by Simon at Tue Aug 29 02:07:09 2006

Simon, spaces and tabs in Python aren't simply style the way they are in C++ or Perl.  They have semantic significance.

DD's should be prepared to go through the bug reports and forward them upstream if that's where they go.

Posted by Joe Buck at Tue Aug 29 06:15:47 2006

What Simon said (I mean, this is going a bit too far), + from a quick glance yesterday, the spacing seemed to be consistent inside both files, but not among both.

At least that was the minor part of the fun for me.

Posted by Jordi at Tue Aug 29 09:54:48 2006

I'm sure there is a magic way to get both files looking the same, and I think it might be the emacs mode. Failing that, I have a bit of python to sort this sort of thing out.

Pete

Posted by Peter Nuttall at Tue Aug 29 10:17:20 2006