but this is still not feasible because a lot of people touch the code, and even the same person touches it using different editors, from different boxes, etc. How are you going to make sure everyone has their editors setup just so (if at all possible!)? Face it, there's no way it can work, especially in an internet-like setting where you simply can not impose such strict environmental constraints on people.
Of course we can : we have a nice quality gate called 'Alexandre' which commits all the patches. So we just need to, either :
1) write a tool that checks the source code for correct tabbing and rejects the patch if it does not follow THE RULES
2) or even better, write a re-tabulator which produce source code following THE RULES (tool that would be applied to all source code on each commit).
So it's certainly possible to have it working :-)
Lionel