Re: blank line following trailing backslash

[Ralf Wildenhues]

* Bob Friesenhahn wrote on Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 02:47:26AM CET:
> On Mon, 26 Jan 2009, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
>> Jan already provided a way around this.  Here's why automake warns about
>> it at all: it is not portable to have a backslash followed by a blank
>> line, as some make implementations are rather unpredictable with it:
>
> However, Automake could offer to re-write the list so that the result is 
> portable.

Yes, it could.  Automake however also promises to mostly copy its input
to its output literally, and any diversion of that causes friction, bugs
and unexpected behavior.  Not saying that it couldn't be done safely for
this issue.  But for the related issue of comment lines ending in
backslash it isn't even clear to me which would be the intended result,
and not rewriting both would also be inconsistent.

Oh well, I'm not strictly against fixing this instance, if somebody
provides a good patch (including doc, testsuite updating etc).

Cheers,
Ralf