Re: White Space Problems--Again

[Tom Browder]

On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 3:49 PM, Philip Guenther <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 5:36 AM, Tom Browder <address@hidden> wrote:
>> I know there are words in the Make manual warning about insidious
>> white space at the ends of strings, but is there any reason that Make
>> couldn't do trimming during parsing?
>
> Well, the POSIX standard requires the current behavior.
>
> It's also part of the documented way of getting a variable that
> contains just whitespace, so there are presumably makefiles out there
> that make use of current behavior.  Changing the behavior would break
> those makefiles and create a general version incompatibility problem.

The GNU Coding Standards allow extensions to POSIX behavior.  Why
shouldn't GNU Make have an extension to have the trimming behavior?

A survey of folks who actually rely on the current Make behavior on
white space versus those who find it awkward and non-intuitive would
be interesting.

-Tom