Oh, I definitely agree that meaningful whitespace can be a pain, and I'm not a very big fan in general (although I prefer meaningful whitespace like in Python to terribly indented code with regards to readability). I guess my point was just that if you're having a lot of failures due to incorrect indentation, it sounds like a systemic issue somewhere. While meaningful indentation can be annoying, I think it sounds like symptom of something more if it's responsible for most of your production failures.

I think the bottom line for me is that if a config file regularly causes errors because of incorrect indentation, it should probably be refactored, since it's clearly not easy enough to read that those errors are caught.