Re: Minimal example for perl program

[Steffen Dettmer]

On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 9:23 AM, Russ Allbery <address@hidden> wrote:
> It breaks the basic assumption that Makefile.am is basically a
> makefile.  I suppose that Automake could try to transform the
> whitespace as part of its processing, but I'm not sure that's a
> good idea.

I even think it would be a bad idea because unless implemented
very smart and intelligent, it could break some constructions
like `inline-scripts'.

There is this special handling of escaped line endings (i.e. "\"
at the end of a line) that in make leads to escape the linefeed
but without removing the "\" (unlike all other escapings I know).
So when you have:

------------------------------------------------------------------->8=======
test:
        perl -e 'print "multi line\n\
        continued here\n"'
=======8<-------------------------------------------------------------------

I think someone could expect:


------------------------------------------------------------------->8=======
address@hidden:~/work # make
perl -e 'print "multi line\n\
   continued here\n"'
multi line
   continued here
=======8<-------------------------------------------------------------------

but what happens is

------------------------------------------------------------------->8=======
address@hidden:~/work # make
perl -e 'print "multi line\n\
   continued here\n"'
multi line

   continued here
=======8<-------------------------------------------------------------------

so someone may write:

------------------------------------------------------------------->8=======
test:
        $(SCRIPT)

SCRIPT=perl -e 'print "multi line\n\
   continued here\n"'
=======8<-------------------------------------------------------------------

so an `automatic re-tabify' would need to be quite intelligent I think...


oki,

Steffen