bug#20322: 25.0.50; indent-tabs-mode should default to nil

[Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru>]

On 04/14/2015 06:29 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> But it's simply _wrong_ to configure everything in one place, because
> different modes have different conventions.

Configuring everything in one place is easy and nice, as long as that's 
what you want to do (and setting indent-tabs-mode for most modes is 
something that a lot of people would prefer).

As long as you can override it for different modes (e.g. in hooks), 
there's no downside.

>> Maybe, but my point is that going by this logic most major modes would
>> need to set it to nil.
>
> I don't understand why.  Can you explain?

Because spaces are more popular than tabs, in most language communities?

> If you only change that in modes which really need that, this problem
> won't exist, because, as you yourself said, everybody already
> customized these modes to use that value.

Yes, and that's not what I'm talking about. JavaScript (or Ruby, or 
Python) don't _really_ need that. They can work with tabs, but most 
users would want to disable tabs in indentation anyway, for cultural, 
personal or organizational reasons.