[Distutils] Watch those tabs!

[Tim Peters]

[Greg Ward]
> when submitting patches, please be sure that no evil tabs sneak in!
> I've just noticed that there are several Distutils source files with the
> dreaded ^I in them.  I need to be more vigilant in fixing tabs when I
> apply patches, and patch authors need to be more vigilant about not
> letting them into their patches in the first place.  Remember,
>
>   (setq-default indent-tabs-mode nil)
>
> is your friend!
>
>         Greg
>
> (What, you mean there are editors other than Emacs in the world?
> Nawwww...)

Just noting that, as of a couple weeks ago, I introduced
Tools/scripts/reindent.py.    Its sole purpose in life is to rewrite .py
files to use 4-space indents and contain no hard tab characters.  I haven't
caught it screwing up anything yet, but my own .py files are so close to
that already they're not really much of a test.  After 2.0 is released, The
Plan is to run this thing over every .py file in the std distribution.

Note that it will not overwrite a file if it's already happy with it -- it
saves the "before" and "after" contents verbatim, and leaves things alone if
they're the same.  There's also a "dry run" switch (-d) that can be used in
conjunction with verbose mode (-v) to simply tell you *which* files it
thinks needs fixing without actually changing anything.

Note that reindent.py *assumes* that tabnanny.py is already happy.

While no substitute for Emacs, it requires far less memory to run <wink>.

emacs==eighty-megs-and-constantly-swapping-ly y'rs  - tim