This one is suitable for both spacebar-lovers and tab-lovers, so let it be peace and friendship. :)

More of it, that’s what the tab character was initially intended for! “If not broken, why mend it?”.

My personal oppinion about those “2-spaces fans” can seem exotic, but I’m no enemy. If I’m wrong, laugh at it and don’t take it too seriously. I think that Ruby and Ruby on Rails is conceived by many of us being “way too revolutionary”. In fact, even more revolutionary than it actually is. So many are glad to destroy everything smelling “old regime” even if it has actually proven itself to be quite solid. Poor tab character is the helpless victim. :)

My personal counter-arguments against 2 spaces are:

* There are hundreds of editors in existence. As far as I can tell, almost none of them supports BLOCK INDENT/UNINDENT (mark N lines and indent/unindent them) made of 2-space sequences without a lot of tweaking and personalization. Some editors don’t support it at all.

Also to my humble knowledge, almost EVERY more or less usable editor supports block indent/unindent made of tabs with no additional tweaking at all. AND EVEN IF IT DOES NOT, you can also do it by hand, since adding or erasing one character a line isn’t a big deal.

* What about “occasional editing”, when you have to make a couple of hot fixes/improvements after the project has already been deployed on the customer’s resources? Ask a remote hosting administrator immediately bring you a graphical Mac shell with TextMate running on it?

In situations like this you’ll have to use the hardware and software YOU ARE GIVEN and don’t have chance to ask for more. Experienced programmers have been in such a situation dozens of times. That’s why they don’t rely on tweaking too much.

You love your Mac, your TextMate, your IDE tweaked to your personal highest grade of comfort? Go code for another 5-10 years and then return to my comment. I’m sure you’ll get rid of all your tweaks by that time. No offense please.

* As far as I can tell, web templates are normally built up of HTML+CSS+ERB+JS. To my experience, the only way to get a viable template is PROPER INDENTATION OF ALL LOGICAL LAYERS, no matter which language they are in. Yes, if there’s a , and then a and then and then Ruby code in it, indent each layer as if they are all the same language. The simpler the rule — the easier it’s to follow.

And now tell me, 2-spaces guys, will you ask your colleagues HTML/CSS/JS coders convert to 2-space religion either? Or you’ll mix indentation styles? Or just don’t care about non-Ruby indentations at all?

All above mentioned possible solutions will lead to TROUBLE AND LOSS OF TIME.

I’m for freedom of choice. But I’m also for not forgetting the basic roots of programming. If tabs are good in BAD languages, why throwing them out of GOOD ones?

“However, I would be rather irked if someone converted all the spaces to tabs on an open source project because they prefer it” – I totally agree; I would never break an established coding standard for the sake of fighting a holy war. (Following one standard, even a stupid one, is much better than mixing them.) But this plugin came about because it was Rails which was breaking our in-house de facto standard of using tabs. De facto, because we have front-end developers who are used to working in things like Macromedia Homesite where the tab key inserts a tab character, and it was so clearly the one sensible way to work that nobody thought to write that down as a standard.

If you think that the above rant reflects badly on my communication skills – fine. However, I would ask that before you come to that conclusion, you apply the same critical standards to the Rails core team, whose communications with me – here and elsewhere – have boiled down to “I don’t really like your code. Why don’t you go off and find someone who can tell you what’s wrong with it?” Certainly, something has gone wrong in the process here to end up with a potential contributor being completely alienated, and I really hope that Rails doesn’t have such a cult of hero worship around it that people automatically assume that the problem is my attitude.

If your entire team agrees to buck the Rails convention and use tabs, *and* you aren’t concerned with making your code less workable by others in the community, then by all means go for it. However, I would be rather irked if someone converted all the spaces to tabs on an open source project because they prefer it, without regard to the established coding style.

Your points on the belongs_to behavior have merit. Unfortunately, the general tone of this post is one of passive aggressive frustration and childish temper tantrum throwing and is frankly unbecoming of a developer. Certainly not of the kind of developer I would want on one of my teams, communicating with other developers and with clients. It casts a unfortunate shadow on the work you’ve done on the plugin and patch.

Yes, I’ll grant you that my “all’s well that ends well” comment only really applies to that one ticket (except actually it doesn’t, because the patch has since been reverted on the grounds that it doesn’t also fix some other stale references that it never claimed to fix in the first place) and not to the wider Rails development process, which based on this experience, is fundamentally broken. Don’t blame me for that though.

And please do tell me which reasonable best practices I’m neglecting. I’m happy to follow them just as long as someone can explain what’s so reasonable about them (as opposed to them being handed down from on high by someone who purports to know my project better than I do). In the cases of assignment-by-ID and indenting with tabs, no-one’s done that yet.

I was going to comment on your repeated insistence that your unique and beautiful snowflake habits are more important than following reasonable best practices as well but the bruises on my forehead remind me how this argument usually turns out.

I’ve been bitten by this bug in Rails and tried a number of possible solutions before finding your plugin. belongs_to_synchronization is the only thing I’ve tried that works so I’d like to thank you for your efforts.

Tony.