Mail Archives: djgpp/1998/08/26/01:10:00
On 26 Aug 98 at 1:39, Oliver Richman wrote:
> On Tue, 25 Aug 1998 15:17:26 +0300 (IDT), Eli Zaretskii
> <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il> wrote:
>
> >On Mon, 24 Aug 1998, Salvador Eduardo Tropea (SET) wrote:
> >
> >> Perhaps Gisle can send an e-mail to the maintainers asking for the addition
> >> of some switch to make it.
> >
> >I already asked the GNU Make maintainer about this. His reply was
> >that there are 2 reasons against such a change:
>
> Yes, but the problem is a problem because make *always* reports it as
> an error when there are spaces in front of a command when a tab should
> be there. It's always the same error and it is a pain to fix.
That's because it is an error, under Make's current syntax rules. If
you leave out all the semicolons in a C program it's an error. The
compiler will report it as an error, but just because it can tell
when something's wrong doesn't mean that it should guess the solution
to the problem.
I'm not sure why people find this awkward to fix -- they shouldn't
need to, if they write their makefiles properly (i.e. using tabs),
with a decent text editor (i.e. one that knows what a tab is).
If it is a real problem, it should be trivial to write a sed script
or C program to tabify the file -- or just use an existing program
to do this. Ideally you'd only want to do this to command lines
(i.e. indented lines following lines containing colons not suffixed
by equal signs [or some similar rule]).
--
george DOT foot AT merton DOT oxford DOT ac DOT uk
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