[pmwiki-users] leading spaces switch for 2.2.0 (somewhat important)

Kathryn Andersen kat_lists at katspace.homelinux.org
Mon Mar 26 06:41:28 CDT 2007


On Mon, Mar 26, 2007 at 07:03:53AM -0400, The Editor wrote:
> On 3/26/07, marc <gmane at auxbuss.com> wrote:
> > The syntax exists; it's a very easy to use; it is used frequently.
> 
> Granted.  Still doesn't tell me at all what you use it for.  I have
> NEVER used it until the latest revisions of my recipes, and then only
> for config pages.  Again, I was and still am honestly curious how
> other admins use this rule. At least it would be worth throwing into
> the conversation. I mean if you have a good reason for it, share it.
> I'm open.

I thought I'd already mentioned how I used it?  (Oh, I mentioned it on
the -Talk page...)

One of the wikis I administer is at my workplace, a software company.
We use this wiki to document procedures, standards, tips, support
issues, events, projects -- even our library!

There are two main uses of preformatted text that get used over and over
again in our wiki:

1) examples
That is, examples of code snippets, of file formats, of templates.
These need to be exact and line-by-line, thus they are preformatted.

2) sequences of commands
We do a lot of things on the command-line; there are quite a few pages
on the wiki that describe what commands to use -- whether that be
commands used to install software, or run software, or run tests, or set
up environments, there are many pages with such white-space-leading
preformatted sequences.

In both those cases, removing the whitespace-preformat rule would
require a lot of niggly editing to fix, and until that was done,
the existing content would be garbled.

For example, there's a world of difference between

        mv -f Makefile Makefile.bak
        imake -DUseInstalled -I/usr/openwin/lib/X11/config -DHasGcc2=YES

and

mv -f Makefile Makefile.bak imake -DUseInstalled
-I/usr/openwin/lib/X11/config -DHasGcc2=YES

The second one is garbled, but that's what would happen if the
whitespace preformatted rule were to suddenly vanish.

Especially in the case of the sequence of commands, they need to be
exact, so that it can be helpful to cut-and-paste the commands to make
things easier.

Kathryn Andersen
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