Torvalds Injects Tabs to Thwart Kconfig Parsers Not Correctly Handling Them

The patch[0] in question:

Commit d96c36004e31 ("tracing: Fix FTRACE_RECORD_RECURSION_SIZE Kconfig entry") removed a hidden tab because it apparently showed breakage in some third-party kernel config parsing tool.

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.

I'd add more random tabs to our Kconfig files, but I don't want to make things uglier than necessary. But it might bbe necessary if it turns out we see more of this kind of silly tooling.

Fixes: d96c36004e31 ("tracing: Fix FTRACE_RECORD_RECURSION_SIZE Kconfig entry") Link: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wj-hLLN_t_m5OL4dXLaxvXKy_... Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

[0] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...

Ah ah. Why not, I guess. I would call a parser attacked and thwarted by this commit "tabbed".

Also, a commenter asked ChatGPT to rewrite Linus' commit message in Torvalds style. The result is not bad, but I suspect it's not as good as it could be if ChatGPT didn't censor itself.

tabs vs spaces

vi(m) vs emacs

golgotha for geeks