I've done too much blame-chasing in my time as flashrom maintainer and would rather not repeat that ever again. When you're trying to track down a bug, the age of the code is less relevant than the number of no-op commits you have to wade through.
With regard to reformatting, both a reformat with tabs and a reformat with spaces do not make much sense. Once a new programmer with a longer name than expected comes along, someone will reformat the whole file again. And again. Not having this aligned is actually a feature, because then you don't have to realign it.
Carl-Daniel raises a good point about relying on spaces/tabs being fragile... I guess we could impose a length limit for programmer name, or put each element on its own line? Or just leave it alone.
I'm not sold on the blame argument since that can be used to argue against just about any non-critical refactoring or cleanup task. However I sympathize with wanting to make blame-chasing simpler.
Patch set 1:-Code-Review
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