Re: [PATCH] maint: indent with spaces, not TABs, and add a rule to check this

[Bruno Haible]

Hi Jim,

Jim Meyering wrote:
> It is trivial to avoid leading TABs in a script
> that emits a Makefile snippet with leading TABs.
> Here's one way that is perhaps minimally invasive:
> The change replaces each explicit leading TAB with 8 leading
> spaces and converts each "cat" to a sed command that performs
> the desired 8-sp-to-TAB mapping.

Thanks for the suggestion. It fixes the "make check" complaint.
But the major problem with tabs in .m4 files is that it can get
broken in the future by someone who accidentally untabifies the entire
file. If we're going to add complexity here, I would much prefer that
it gets rid of this problem.

In other words, do you know how to put a tab into a shell variable,
without writing a tab in the source file? For newline, we write

nl='
'

tab=`printf '\t'`

appears to work. Is it portable?

Bruno