Why does CakePHP still use tabs for indent? [closed]

Question

http://book.cakephp.org/2.0/en/contributing/cakephp-coding-conventions.html

I assume this was old, but the v3 branch still uses tabs also. Does anyone know why the newer version doesn't ahere to something like PSR-2?

Answer 1

PSR-2 is not a standard

PSR-2 is a style guide it is not a standard - and even if it were, it's voluntary.

Why not follow PSR-2

Leaving aside any tab-v-spaces war, changing whitespace project wide for CakePHP has the following advantages:

• Match PSR-2

It brings with it the following disadvantages:

• Zero performance or functional benefit
• Inconvenience merging branches
• Merge conflicts and general pain building releases

The last two points are significant - CakePHP has already gone though various automated formatting-related changes, and each time it has lead to time spent/lost coping with merge conflicts whilst building release, or attempting to backport a fix from one version to another.

These are some of the reasons why following this particular rule of PSR-2 isn't likely to occur any time soon.