Given that the only indenting style 99%+ of programmers agree on is “the same style that the rest of the project uses”, failing to adhere to the style used is a fairly egregious faux pas and possibly indicative of a disregard for standards and/or lack of attention to context within the program, raising red flags about possible bugs introduced by the patch.
In any case, the correct response would be to reformat your code (any sane code editor can do this with one command) and resubmit the patch.
The point is not that free software programmers specifically refuse to accept wrongly indented code, the point is that they often refuse to accept code based on wholly arbitrary reasons. Arguing that indentation really isn’t an arbitrary reason is fighting the hypothetical; replace it in your mind with something that is.
There’s also the “we won’t accept this bug report unless it fits this list of arbitrary requirements” gambit (if you actually do manage to submit the bug report following all the requirements, it will still get ignored anyway, but doing it this way they can artificially deflate the number of unfixed bugs and blame things on the user for not following the directions)
Given that the only indenting style 99%+ of programmers agree on is “the same style that the rest of the project uses”, failing to adhere to the style used is a fairly egregious faux pas and possibly indicative of a disregard for standards and/or lack of attention to context within the program, raising red flags about possible bugs introduced by the patch.
In any case, the correct response would be to reformat your code (any sane code editor can do this with one command) and resubmit the patch.
The point is not that free software programmers specifically refuse to accept wrongly indented code, the point is that they often refuse to accept code based on wholly arbitrary reasons. Arguing that indentation really isn’t an arbitrary reason is fighting the hypothetical; replace it in your mind with something that is.
There’s also the “we won’t accept this bug report unless it fits this list of arbitrary requirements” gambit (if you actually do manage to submit the bug report following all the requirements, it will still get ignored anyway, but doing it this way they can artificially deflate the number of unfixed bugs and blame things on the user for not following the directions)