Comments: Authenticated sender is From: "George Foot" 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 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT 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: Precedence: bulk On 26 Aug 98 at 1:39, Oliver Richman wrote: > On Tue, 25 Aug 1998 15:17:26 +0300 (IDT), Eli Zaretskii > 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