On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 3:49 PM, Philip Guenther <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 5:36 AM, Tom Browder <[email protected]> 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 _______________________________________________ Help-make mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-make
