Re: White Space Problems--Again

[Tom Browder]

On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 7:24 PM, Stephan Beal
<address@hidden> wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 11:30 PM, Tom Browder <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Can you give me an example of using a token of spaces in a Makefile?
...
> i *think* it had to so something with joining a list of parameters,
> but i won't swear to that. i did however find an old snippet where i
> explicitly came across this problem:
>
> toc2.platform.file_extensions.exe =# no whitespace, please
>
> i remember that causing me grief when i had a space after the '=', and
> added the comment marker to ensure that it stays empty.

A stripping mod would negate the need for that.

>> I'm really having a hard time seeing why it would be proscribed in
>> POSIX, too.
>
> Probably for historical reasons, since the standard was written long
> after make was commonplace. There's a *lot* of makefile code in the
> world, and changing any given standards-defined behaviour might indeed
> break 1 or even 2 projects.

Somehow I believe the POSIX folks had never used Make.  And ABI's are
broken all the time, albeit without serious consideration.

> While looking through my docs for a practical use i still haven't
> found one, but i did find mention of the $(strip) function, which
> normalizes whitespace - strips leading/trailing and compresses
> multiple spaces into a single space. That might be helpful in your
> case.

Yes, I mentioned in my original post that I had to use it.

So it looks to me like we are lamely supporting a standard feature
that not many people use.  Adding the feature as an extension would
hurt no one, and would certainly make life easier for many of us.
Perhaps a new Make-specific environment variable could be used to set
the extension to be used site-wide.

-Tom