Re: [PATCH] Modernize, improve and/or extend tests `colon*.test.

[Stefano Lattarini]

At Sunday 08 August 2010, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> * Stefano Lattarini wrote on Sun, Aug 08, 2010 at 05:09:03PM CEST:
> > At Sunday 08 August 2010, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> > >  tgt1 tgt2 \
> > >  
> > >       tgt3 : dep1 dep2 \
> > >       dep3 \
> > >       
> > >              dep4
> > > 
> > > Posix is perfectly clear about the list of targets
> > 
> > Should be "tgt1 tgt2 tgt3 tgt4", right?
> 
> Yes; well, there is non tgt4 in my example.  ;-)
> 
> > > and the list of dependencies.
> > 
> > Should be "dep1 dep2 dep3 dep4", right?
> 
> Yep.  And except for the initial one of the two spaces before tgt1,
> all whitespace can contain either spaces or tabs.
> 
> > > extract_makefile_deps can extract that.
> > 
> > I still don't understand how this qualifies as an objection to my
> > proposal.
 
> You proposed to introduce a complex perl script.  I objected that,
> if we're going to introduce something complex, might as well
> introduce something that more correctly parses make syntax then.
> And sed, of course, since perl is hard to read.  ;-)  Your perl
> script won't parse the above example right.  automake is free to
> create constructs such as the above, because every 'make'
> implementation *will* parse it correctly, so it would not be a bug
> in automake if it created such code. (Could be a QoI issue, but
> that's a different matter.)
> Have I managed to completely confuse you now?  ;-)
I have to say that I agree (apart from the use of sed obviously ;-),
because it turns out that we are speaking about two rather different 
issues.

Here, I'm *not* defending my perl script -- please, let's just forget 
about it from now on, it's irrelevant.

I'm just saying that when we'll write the `extract_makefile_deps' 
function, it shouldn't bother with preserving tabs and backslashes;
on the other hand, it should actively normalize them to space in
order to simplify grepping and matching of the extracted info.

So that, with your example below, something like:
  foo=`extract_makefile_deps tgt2 Makefile`; echo x"$foo"x
should print:
  x dep1 dep2 dep3 dep4 x

Have I managed to make my point now?  If yes, what do you think of my 
proposal?

Thanks,
  Stefano