Why cpplint doesn't care about indentation/spaces and what is the alternative?
Solution 1:
Cpplint only checks a few special indentation cases, it is not a complete style checker. The cause for this is that cpplint does not property parse files, but checks files line-by-line using regular expressions. That makes it hard to write certain checks for issues that require reasoning about Multi-Line contexts.
So cpplint does not check for the style flaws of your example.