[Tutor] I know you will hate this but...

[Andrei]

Smith, Jeff <jsmith <at> medplus.com> writes:   
> merge...that doesn't really matter.  It seems problematic to me to try   
> to enforce tool standards on people (IDE and editor settings) which may   
> or may not take.   
   
It seems problematic to me to NOT enforce standard *settings* (e.g. 4 spaces   
per indentation level, no tabs). Any IDE can be used as long as the proper   
settings are configured. Inconsistent indentation styles are very annoying in   
other languages, but a fatal problem in Python.   
   
> My solution has been to require (as a coding standard) ending comments   
> on control blocks longer than one line.  At least this is something that   
> could be caught at submit time with an automated review tool.   
   
Weird. Looks to me like the wrong solution (it would IMO be better to find out 
who committed the broken code and work from there to find the cause), but 
whatever works for you.   
   
> I'd be interested in how anyone else has solved this problem...provided   
> you've seen it.   
   
I haven't, but I use Subversion and haven't done team development in Python. 
But I don't think any half-decent VCS should go around modifying code on its 
own in *any* way, even if it's spaces. Although, now that I think about it, a 
VCS might have an option of ignoring leading/trailing whitespace when doing 
diffs, such an option could bite when merging Python code. 
 
Yours, 
 
Andrei