This morning’s gripe is something that really gets on my tits, but has properly bitten me on the arse this morning: different formatting of code.

In my code, I use real-tab (0x09) characters for indentation of 8 spaces apiece, using Unix linefeeds (0x0a). Simple enough, since I occasionally do hotfixes on code and doing it in Unix editors makes life a hell of a lot easier. That’s fine. The issue comes when a client is using their own cocktail of every bloody style under the sun – in this particular case I’ve been asked to merge in some of my own changes in a hurry, and I find that not only has the client been using incorrect tab style (4-space indentation, proper space chars as well) he’s also saved the whole sodding source tree in a mix of CRLF and LF. This now means I have a nightmare diffing it to find out what conflicts there are, since everything conflicts.

THERE IS A CODE STYLE GUIDE THERE FOR A REASON. PLEASE DON’T MAKE ME GET THE KNIVES AND CUT YOU. PLEASE.

Time for me to write a Polystyle rule for it, which will hopefully fix the situation enough for me to meet deadline in an hour.