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

[Jim Meyering]

Bruno Haible wrote:
> 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?

Yes, that is what I would use.