The number of people has been steadily increasing who read our source
code with an editor that thinks tab stops are 4 spaces apart, as
opposed to the traditional tty-derived 8 that the PuTTY code expects.
So I've been wondering for ages about just fixing it, and switching to
a spaces-only policy throughout the code. And I recently found out
about 'git blame -w', which should make this change not too disruptive
for the purposes of source-control archaeology; so perhaps now is the
time.
While I'm at it, I've also taken the opportunity to remove all the
trailing spaces from source lines (on the basis that git dislikes
them, and is the only thing that seems to have a strong opinion one
way or the other).
Apologies to anyone downstream of this code who has complicated patch
sets to rebase past this change. I don't intend it to be needed again.
This is a thing I've been meaning to set up for a while: it's a
pull-based search system (that is, the caller takes each step of the
search manually, rather than providing a callback), which lets the
caller inspect every step of the search, including the index of each
candidate element in the tree. This allows flexible kinds of query
that play the element and its index off against each other.
I've also rewritten the existing findrelpos234() search function using
the new one as a primitive, because that simplifies it a lot!