Torvalds complicates his use of indentation in Linux Kconfig
Quoting:
Linux kernel supremo Linus Torvalds has made the use of indentation in kernel config files more ambiguous – intentionally to weed out inferior parsers.
Kernel 6.9-rc4, the latest release candidate for the next version of the Linux kernel, came out yesterday. Among the usual drivers and bug fixes, it contains some more tweaks for bcachefs, as well as some mitigations against the recently-uncovered Spectre-style Native Branch History Injection data leaks.
However, the change that brought the most amusement to the face of the Reg FOSS desk is a configuration file change from Linus himself, titled "Kconfig: add some hidden tabs on purpose." He switched a space indent to a tab indent to catch out poor-quality parsers.
Update
Also here:
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Linus Torvalds reiterates his tabs-versus-spaces stance with a kernel trap | Ars Technica
Anybody can contribute to the Linux kernel, but any person's commit suggestion can become the focus of the kernel's master and namesake, Linus Torvalds. Torvalds is famously not overly committed to niceness, though he has been working on it since 2018. 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.
The commit last week changed exactly one thing on one line, replacing a tab character with a space: "It helps Kconfig parsers to read file without error." Torvalds responded with a commit of his own, as spotted by The Register, which would "add some hidden tabs on purpose." Trying to smooth over a tabs-versus-spaces matter seemed to awaken Torvalds to the need to have tab-detecting failures be "more obvious." Torvalds would have added more, he wrote, but didn't "want to make things uglier than necessary. But it *might* be necessary if it turns out we see more of this kind of silly tooling."
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