On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 9:23 AM, Russ Allbery <[email protected]> wrote:
> It breaks the basic assumption that Makefile.am is basically a
> makefile. I suppose that Automake could try to transform the
> whitespace as part of its processing, but I'm not sure that's a
> good idea.
I even think it would be a bad idea because unless implemented
very smart and intelligent, it could break some constructions
like `inline-scripts'.
There is this special handling of escaped line endings (i.e. "\"
at the end of a line) that in make leads to escape the linefeed
but without removing the "\" (unlike all other escapings I know).
So when you have:
------------------------------------------------------------------->8=======
test:
perl -e 'print "multi line\n\
continued here\n"'
=======8<-------------------------------------------------------------------
I think someone could expect:
------------------------------------------------------------------->8=======
[email protected]:~/work # make
perl -e 'print "multi line\n\
continued here\n"'
multi line
continued here
=======8<-------------------------------------------------------------------
but what happens is
------------------------------------------------------------------->8=======
[email protected]:~/work # make
perl -e 'print "multi line\n\
continued here\n"'
multi line
continued here
=======8<-------------------------------------------------------------------
so someone may write:
------------------------------------------------------------------->8=======
test:
$(SCRIPT)
SCRIPT=perl -e 'print "multi line\n\
continued here\n"'
=======8<-------------------------------------------------------------------
so an `automatic re-tabify' would need to be quite intelligent I think...
oki,
Steffen
