* Russ Allbery wrote on Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 09:23:41AM CEST: > Ole Tange writes: > > Ralf Wildenhues wrote: > > >> I wish automake could warn about leading whitespace damage; > >> unfortunately, the parser would need to be quite a bit smarter > >> for such a warning to work reliably. > > > Could it be extended so you could start the line with either <TAB> or > > <DOT><WHITESPACE>? Or would that break too much backwards > > compatability? > > 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.
No, I don't like that either. However, there is a POSIX make-blessed alternative in that you can use: target... : prereq... ; command... instead of: target... : prereq...<newline> <tab>command... throughout; that is portable to all make implementations I know of. I'm not aware of automake bugs with the former spelling, but it's not used very much I guess; if you encounter one, please report it. Thanks, Ralf
