Date: Tue, 25 Aug 1998 15:17:26 +0300 (IDT)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
To: "Salvador Eduardo Tropea (SET)" <salvador AT inti DOT gov DOT ar>
cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com, giva AT bryggen DOT bgnett DOT no
Subject: Re: ANNOUNCE: Make 3.77 uploaded
In-Reply-To: <m0zAx4K-000S4NC@inti.gov.ar>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.980825151704.7520c-100000@is>
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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:

     1) Posix requires the TABs.

     2) There are many Makefiles that indent lines which define
	variables, e.g., like this:

              FOO = bar
        FOOBARBAZ = bazbarfoo

	i.e., they align the variables on the equals sign.  Anybody
        who worked with a utility called Imake have seen a lot of such
        Makefiles.

        There are also lots of Makefiles which indent continuation
        lines in rules with spaces, for beauty.

	Such Makefiles will be totally broken if several spaces signal
        a command.

Since this change is contrary to Posix, I doubt that the maintainer
will accept even a DOS-specific run-time option.  He might accept this
as a compile-time option, but I don't like the idea of telling people
to recompile Make, or having two incompatible executables in the
binary distribution

It might be possible to allow Make to change the leading string that
signals the beginning of a command, as a general feature, and then
whoever wants it could use a string of spaces there.

IMHO, overall, this seems like a problem which is too easy to solve by
other means (e.g., by converting spaces to TABs using some utility)
and whose solution inside Make might have dire consequences.

I urge people who want such a change to reconsider whether it is
really worth our while.