Date:	Sat, 28 Sep 1996 14:39:15 +0200 (MET DST)
From:	Mark Habersack <grendel AT ananke DOT amu DOT edu DOT pl>
Reply-To:	grendel AT ananke DOT amu DOT edu DOT pl
To:	Oberhumer Markus <k3040e4 AT c210 DOT edvz DOT uni-linz DOT ac DOT at>
cc:	DJ Delorie <dj AT delorie DOT com>, Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>,
	djgpp-workers <djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com>
Subject:	Re: Make 3.75 port
In-Reply-To:	<199609271442.QAA24472@c210.edvz.uni-linz.ac.at>
Message-ID:	<Pine.NEB.3.95.960928143217.26977C-100000@ananke.amu.edu.pl>
MIME-Version:	1.0

On Fri, 27 Sep 1996, Oberhumer Markus wrote:

>
>>> 2. The FSF is likely to accept a dos-specific fix, if properly #ifdef'd
>>> with __MSDOS__.
>>
>>I'll do the path. It will be adding ~50 characters ;-)))
>
>I'm still not happy with this. As a person who works on multiple
>operating systems I expect at least that same version of 
>the same program handles the same input the same way.
I also work on multiple systems and I guess you can't expect every program to
behave exactly the same, with all details, on all systems it is used on.

>
>I'm not willing to add incompatiblities for people who can't set up
>their editor properly.
As DJ said, this is specific for DOS editors that they tend to replace TABs
with spaces. And since this is a 'native' behavior people using ONLY DOS will
expect make that comes with DJGPP at least, to be able to cope with, de facto, 
standard on their primary (and sometimes the ONLY) environment. In DJGPP FAQ
might be a clause that says that to use some makefiles on other systems wit
GNU make, one has to make sure all indented lines start with TAB.

 >
>A more or less acceptable solution could be an environment variable
>that enables spaces.
Now I think this is what shouldn't be done. It requires runtime detection
which is in fact not needed at all. This change would introduce more
incompatibility than the one I proposed. Most users will not care about
setting env variables, they will expect make to work on every input file.
OTOH, those who use Makefiles on different systems will know this is a
requirement to start indents with TABs, not spaces. Besides, I want to post a
request to change it for ALL systems. I wonder what might be the reasons for
not applying this patch.

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