This is the best summary I could come up with:

You can see glimpses of this newer, less curse-laden approach in how Torvalds recently addressed a commit with which he vehemently disagreed.

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.”

Trying to smooth over a tabs-versus-spaces matter seemed to awaken Torvalds to the need to have tab-detecting failures be “more obvious.”

If you’ve read this far and don’t understand what’s happening, please allow me, a failed CS minor, to offer a quick explanation: Tabs Versus Spaces will never be truly resolved, codified, or set right by standards, and the energy spent on the issue over time could, if harnessed, likely power one or more small nations.

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:

Yes, tab-vs-space confusion is sadly a traditional Unix thing, and ‘make’ is famous for being broken in this regard.

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