On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 7:24 PM, Stephan Beal <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 11:30 PM, Tom Browder <[email protected]> wrote: >> Can you give me an example of using a token of spaces in a Makefile? ... > i *think* it had to so something with joining a list of parameters, > but i won't swear to that. i did however find an old snippet where i > explicitly came across this problem: > > toc2.platform.file_extensions.exe =# no whitespace, please > > i remember that causing me grief when i had a space after the '=', and > added the comment marker to ensure that it stays empty.
A stripping mod would negate the need for that. >> I'm really having a hard time seeing why it would be proscribed in >> POSIX, too. > > Probably for historical reasons, since the standard was written long > after make was commonplace. There's a *lot* of makefile code in the > world, and changing any given standards-defined behaviour might indeed > break 1 or even 2 projects. Somehow I believe the POSIX folks had never used Make. And ABI's are broken all the time, albeit without serious consideration. > While looking through my docs for a practical use i still haven't > found one, but i did find mention of the $(strip) function, which > normalizes whitespace - strips leading/trailing and compresses > multiple spaces into a single space. That might be helpful in your > case. Yes, I mentioned in my original post that I had to use it. So it looks to me like we are lamely supporting a standard feature that not many people use. Adding the feature as an extension would hurt no one, and would certainly make life easier for many of us. Perhaps a new Make-specific environment variable could be used to set the extension to be used site-wide. -Tom _______________________________________________ Help-make mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-make
