[Springframework-developer] Any sort of defined policy w/regards to tab/space usage and indentation?

[Colin S. <col...@ex...>]

I notice that most of the codebase in Spring uses hard tabs as opposed 
to spaces for indentation. From looking at some comment text which does 
have some embedded spaces, as far as I can tell the assumption is that 
tabs equate to 4 chars, although most of the code itself does not seem 
to make this assumption?

Is there any sort of project policy or guideline on this? i.e. something 
like 'all code must use hard tabs, and align elements only with tabs', 
etc.? I can hopefully work with any policy, but I'd just like to know if 
one exists... (although if I am forced to use hard tabs I would actually 
have to set up another Eclipse workspace, right now my tab key puts out 
spaces).

fwiw, I have personally found that hard tabs are somewhat of a disaster 
(or at least a problem) in many team environents. In my teams, it's 
generally the one rule we apply with no exceptions, "no hard tabs". The 
problem is that while hard tabs have the ideal benefit of allowing users 
to indent to whatever size they like, in practice people seem to not 
have the discipline to stick to using tabs only, or their editor of the 
moment doesn't allow them to set the tab size to something else easilly, 
so spaces creep in. Once that happens to any extent, the code looks 
broken to anybody else using another tab size.

Regards,
Colin