Re: Naming: a rose by any other ...

[Boris Kolpackov]

"=?UTF-8?Q?Ram=C3=B3n_Garc=C3=ADa?=" <address@hidden> writes:

> I find it too flexible.

It's the first time I see someone complain about this.


> My favorite behaviour would be that the first line after the rule says
> how much spaces (or tabs or whatever) are used for indenting, and any
> following lines with that indentation or more would belong to the
> recipe. In this way, a user who just types spaces instead of tabs
> would see make just working without obscure settings.

Don't you think a user who managed to learn about this new make extension
would also know about the potential tabs/spaces problem? Also I don't
see much difference between what you propose and setting a global
variable that says use spaces instead of tabs in recipes.


> Although this behaviour cannot be the default for backward
> compatibility. But this is issue can be solved. When make detects that
> the user is using spaces instead of tabs, make would warn the user and
> advice to use the correct flag.

Make grammar is not regular enough to allow such detection without
a million of false positives. Consider for example this:

ifeq ($(baz),y)
  foo: bar
  baz := hello
endif

Also, on a more general note, I think make is too low level for
anyone who cannot overcome the tabs problem. So perhaps you are
trying to solve a problem that does not exist. Or, to put in
another way, tabs is just a first "problem" that you will have
to solve to make GNU make accessible to a wider audience.

Boris