Eight character tabs

Yeah, automated reindentation before commit only works if you have something pre-commit that reindents again. I've worked on projects with such rules, and it does work (certainly better than what we had before, with people with all sorts of tab widths and odious 'optimizing' editors that translated spaces to tabs of whatever width the user had set throughout the entire file on every save). Better yet is to adapt to whatever the coding standard of the project is and just eat your whining most of the time. (Says the guy who whined about part of the kernel's coding standards just a few posts up. Hypocrisy is *good* for you!)