SoylentNews

Freeman [soylentnews.org] writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/linus-torvalds-reiterates-his-tabs-versus-spaces-stance-with-a-kernel-trap/ [arstechnica.com]

Anybody can contribute to the Linux kernel, but any person's commit suggestion can become the subject of the kernel's master and namesake, Linus Torvalds. Torvalds is famously not overly committed to niceness [arstechnica.com], though he has been working on it since 2018 [arstechnica.com]. You can see glimpses of this newer, less curse-laden approach in how Torvalds recently addressed a commit with which he vehemently disagreed. It involves tabs.
[...]
By attempting to smooth over one tiny part of the kernel so that a parsing tool could see a space character as a delineating whitespace, Prasad Pandit inadvertently spurred a robust rebuttal [kernel.org]:

It wasn't clear what tool it was, but let's make sure it gets fixed. Because if you can't parse tabs as whitespace, you should not be parsing the kernel Kconfig files.

In fact, let's make such breakage more obvious than some esoteric ftrace record size option. If you can't parse tabs, you can't have page sizes.

Yes, tab-vs-space confusion is sadly a traditional Unix thing, and 'make' is famous for being broken in this regard. But no, that does not mean that it's ok.

Original Submission