[Dovecot] config file parsing, tab characters

[John Hannfield]

Hello,

I am using the latest dovecot 1.1.2  with postfix, and using doveco
deliver command for LDA.
I really love dovecot, and how it has progressed over the years.
However I have noticed that
if I put a TAB character in the dovecot.conf  file, it sometimes does
not parse the file correctlty,
and complains about missing postmaster_address etc, even though they are there.

So I reformated my config file, with just spaces, no tabs.
I am very careful about that now. However I still seem to have a problem
in some places with spaces.

For example, in the LDA section:
If I have 3 or 4 spaces, after the lda line in the definition, like so:

#-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
# LDA Settings
#-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
protocol lda    {
                          postmaster_address = postmaster at mydomain.com
                          hostname = mydomain.com
                           ....

it does not work. I must have only 1 space between the end of lda and
the curly bracket.
Like this:

#-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
# LDA Settings
#-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
protocol lda {
                          postmaster_address = postmaster at mydomain.com
                          hostname = mydomain.com
                           ....


This seems very flaky.
I am not certain I will always be able to check the file when making changes.
So my question is:

1. Is there someway to check the validity of the dovecot.conf file.
I notice dovecot -n  does not print the entire config.

2. Is there any chance the code used to parse the config file, could
be updated to be more robust, and to include support for tabs?

Thank you.

Paul