This post is about the thing in the title.

I used to work for Yelp. For historical reasons — probably “the initial developers preferred it” — their mostly-Python codebase had always been indented with tabs. That’s in stark contrast to the vast majority of the Python ecosystem, which generally uses the standard library’s style guide recommendation of four spaces. The presence of tabs caused occasional minor headaches and grumbles among the Python developers, who now numbered in the dozens and were generally used to spaces.

At the end of 2013, I bestowed Yelp with a Christmas gift: I converted their entire primary codebase from tabs to four spaces. On the off chance anyone else ever wants to do the same, here’s how I did it. Probably. I mean, it’s been two and a half years, but I wrote most of this at the time, so it should be correct.

Please note: I do not care what you think about tabs versus spaces. That’s for a different post! I no longer work for Yelp, anyway — so as compelling as your argument may be, I can no longer undo what I have done.

Do you just hate Git? Are you perfectly happy with Mercurial (or, yikes, Subversion) but once a month you have to brave Git because everyone and their damn dog is now using GitHub? Are you vaguely aware that about half of all Git commands will probably delete all your work forever, but you don’t know which ones and you don’t want to spend three weeks poring over the documentation?

Good news! I wrote you this amazing Internet post. I hope I can mash just enough Git into your face that you will be less likely to set things on fire, and also less terrified that you might set things on fire. This should also be enough to make the Git documentation a little more comprehensible; it’s extremely thorough, but also overwhelming and nonsensical if you haven’t already read half of it.

I’m trying to keep this brief but also potentially useful to people who have never touched version control at all, so there are some 101 bits sprinkled throughout. Fear not! I don’t actually think Mercurial users have no idea what a patch is.

I just wasted way too much time migrating all of my git repositories to GitHub. It’s way less janky than the old thing, and the guys running it seem to be acceptably hipster-nerdy.

I’m still using Redmine as a bug tracker, and i have a cron going that updates the old repositories regularly, so commits will still appear in tickets and whatnot. This is just a change of canon.

I am considering giving GitHub Issues a shot for small new projects, just to get a feel for it. Redmine is powerful but feels like it’s targeted at my manager. GitHub is, i must admit, very much targeted at the people on the ground doing the hacking.

Anyway, here is a story.

I’m currently hosting a small pile of projects on a combination of self-hosted gitweb and self-hosted Redmine. I keep glancing meaningfully in the direction of GitHub; it’s code-oriented, it has wiki support, it has an issue tracker, and it can do simple site hosting via some contrived abuse of git. So why am I bothering to host my own stuff? There are actually a few reasons, thus I need the Internet to decide for me.