Since the beginning of OpenStack we have had vim modelines all over the codebase, but after seeing this patch https://review.opeenstack.org/#/c/50891/<https://review.openstack.org/#/c/50891/>I took a further look into vim modelines and think we should remove them. Before going any further, I should point out these lines don't bother me too much but I figured if we could get consensus, then we could shrink our codebase by a little bit. Sidenote: This discussion is being moved to the mailing list because it 'would be better to have a mailing list thread about this rather than bits and pieces of discussion in gerrit' as this change requires multiple patches. https://review.openstack.org/#/c/51295/. Why remove them? * Modelines aren't supported by default in debian or ubuntu due to security reasons: https://wiki.python.org/moin/Vim * Having modelines for vim means if someone wants we should support modelines for emacs ( http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/emacs.html#Specifying-File-Variables) etc. as well. And having a bunch of headers for different editors in each file seems like extra overhead. * There are other ways of making sure tabstop is set correctly for python files, see https://wiki.python.org/moin/Vim. I am a vIm user myself and have never used modelines. * We have vim modelines in only 828 out of 1213 python files in nova (68%), so if anyone is using modelines today, then it only works 68% of the time in nova * Why have the same config 828 times for one repo alone? This violates the DRY principle (Don't Repeat Yourself). Related Patches: https://review.openstack.org/#/c/51295/ https://review.openstack.org/#/q/status:open+project:openstack/nova+branch:master+topic:noboilerplate,n,z best, Joe -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/attachments/20131024/b284342b/attachment.html>