Re: Bitten by Makefile.am syntax error

[Alexandre Duret-Lutz]

| A number of times I have been bitten by missing backslashes at the end
| of lines.  Automake does not warn.  A typical example is:
| 
| if !HasX11
| TESTS_X11_XFAIL_TESTS =
|       tests/rwblob_XWD_bilevel.sh \
|       tests/rwblob_XWD_gray.sh \
|       tests/rwblob_XWD_pallette.sh \
|       tests/rwblob_XWD_truecolor.sh \
|       tests/rwfile_XWD_bilevel.sh \
|       tests/rwfile_XWD_gray.sh \
|       tests/rwfile_XWD_pallette.sh \
|       tests/rwfile_XWD_truecolor.sh
| endif
| 
| Is there a way that Automake can reasonably produce warnings in this
| case?

Not now.
 
| Another issue with backslashes that I have encountered is that
| Automake doesn't like them at the end of comment lines.  It will issue
| a diagnostic for
| 
| #  some text \
| #  some more text \

Use `##' if you really want to suppress a line.

| It seems to me that the comment should override the line continuation
| request.

This happens in *some* Make implementations.  However this is
contrary to POSIX.  See `Escaped newline in comments' paragraph
in the `Limitations of Make' section of the Autoconf manual.

-- 
Alexandre Duret-Lutz