Comments:	Authenticated sender is <mert0407 AT sable DOT ox DOT ac DOT uk>
From:	"George Foot" <george DOT foot AT merton DOT oxford DOT ac DOT uk>
To:	oliver AT hv DOT jesus DOT ox DOT ac DOT uk (Oliver Richman)
Date:	Wed, 26 Aug 1998 06:07:51 +0000
MIME-Version:	1.0
Subject:	Re: ANNOUNCE: Make 3.77 uploaded
Reply-to:	george DOT foot AT merton DOT oxford DOT ac DOT uk
CC:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Message-Id:	<E0zBXpd-0006jv-00@sable.ox.ac.uk>

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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