Re: [PATCH] Improve “missing separator” error when reading spaces

[Paul Smith]

On Sat, 2016-11-19 at 18:49 +0100, Michael Stapelberg wrote:
> With this change, users who have their editor misconfigured when writing
> Makefiles without using 8 spaces for one TAB character will also get a
> friendly error message.

I'm not a fan of this change.

Make's "missing separator" is really a generic "syntax error" message. 
It just means that make couldn't parse the line.  There are lots of
reasons that a line couldn't be parsed, that have nothing to do with a
missing TAB.  There are also lots of makefiles that indent lines (with
spaces) which are not intended to be recipe lines.

I don't like the idea of telling the user that every line make can't
recognize, that begins with a space, should be changed into a recipe
line by adding a TAB.