On Sun, Aug 11, 2019 at 3:54 PM William Hubbs <willi...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > On Sun, Aug 11, 2019 at 03:04:02PM -0700, Matt Turner wrote: > > On Sun, Aug 11, 2019 at 12:48 PM William Hubbs <willi...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > > If we are going to require a modeline, shouldn't we consider allowing > > > them by default so we can work out of the box instead of having to tweak > > > our editor settings? > > > > Perhaps we should. Is this really an important point for you? > > > > I don't think any of that needs to hold up Michał's proposal though. > > Let's move away from talking about alignment for a minute. > > The reason I responded originally was that his proposal is a bit > vague. It says that whitespace separates fields; that could be spaces > or tabs. whitespace can also be a completely valid character in > the notes field. So, since he says we can add more fields in the future, > you either have to escape whitespace in the notes field or quote the > field. > > Also, he may have used one whitespace character to separate fields in his > example, but the spec allows any number of whitespace characters.
Sigh. The intention is to make it easily machine parseable and easily readable by humans. One or more whitespace characters is easy to recognize by a machine, be they space or tabs. Aligned columns are easily readable by humans. I think humans are able to follow existing convention when adding new lines to the file and don't require specific rules like this. There's nothing unclear or vague in his explanation. Can we please proceed?
