Re: [PATCH] Makefile(s): avoid recipe prefix in conditional statements

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Apr 9, 2024, 00:04 UTC
Message-ID: <20240409000414.GA1647304@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <606990048585347654f3b4b187ec27f4dc1b85e3.camel@gnu.org>

On Mon, Apr 08, 2024 at 07:24:16PM -0400, Paul Smith wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> If you wanted to make an even bigger change, which might save some
> hair-pulling down the road but is a very serious decision, you could
> introduce the use of the .RECIPEPREFIX [1] variable to change the
> recipe prefix from TAB to some other character (as it should have been
> when make was created back in the 1970's).
> 
> .RECIPEPREFIX was introduced in GNU Make 3.82, which was released in
> 2010 FYI.

Unfortunately, that's too recent for us. :( We try to keep the GNU make dependency to 3.81, since that's the latest one Apple ships (because they're allergic to GPLv3). Obviously it's not impossible to jump past that and require people to install make via homebrew, etc, but that makes it a more significant version bump than usual.

I do find it curious that in:

ifdef FOO
	SOME_VAR += bar
endif

the tab is significant for "ifdef" but not for SOME_VAR (at least that is implied by Taylor's patch, which does not touch the bodies within the conditionals).

I may just be showing my ignorance of the parsing issue, though. For anybody else digging into the details, I think the correct link is:

  https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?64185

(the commit has the wrong bug number, 64815).

-Peff