Bug#1100700: exim4 uses a mix of tabs and spaces within individual lines

[Marc Haber]

On Thu, Mar 20, 2025 at 09:20:36AM +0000, Ben Raven wrote:
>root at ben-test-2:/# grep -nPR /etc/exim4 -e "^\t "
>/etc/exim4/exim4.conf.template:2120:            }\
>/etc/exim4/exim4.conf.template:2121:            {\\N[\\^]\\N}\
>/etc/exim4/exim4.conf.template:2122:            {^^}\
>/etc/exim4/exim4.conf.template:2123:        }
>/etc/exim4/conf.d/auth/30_exim4-config_examples:244:            }\
>/etc/exim4/conf.d/auth/30_exim4-config_examples:245:
> {\\N[\\^]\\N}\
>/etc/exim4/conf.d/auth/30_exim4-config_examples:246:            {^^}\
>/etc/exim4/conf.d/auth/30_exim4-config_examples:247:        }

These are all dpkg-conffiles. Doing those changes for cosmetic reasons 
will trigger conffile change prompts on thousands of systems. I'd 
recommend not doing this until those files need changes for non-cosmetic 
reasons, where it is appropriate to piggyback cosmetics on them as well.

>I'm not seeing these files in the exim upstream source code (
>https://github.com/Exim/exim), but they are in the Debian exim4 source code
>(https://salsa.debian.org/exim-team/exim4), which also contains many more
>lines beginning with a tab followed by spaces. Apologies if this isn't the
>right place to be reporting this; if so, where would be?

The exim upstream sources contain an src/configure.default. I think most 
of our exim4.conf.template is generated from patching this file.

Greetings
Marc

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