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Not be sound harsh, but your problem lies here My personal preference for everything is spaces You want a tool that has been around longer than you do st

by pawadu 10y ago

Not be sound harsh, but your problem lies here My personal preference for everything is spaces You want a tool that has been around longer than you do stuff your way. I think it is better if learn to work with the tools and accept that there is a reason some things work in certain ways.

nneonneo 10y ago
I've already configured my editors and tools to work with Make, and I'm not so much complaining about Make here as I am pointing out one of its most annoying warts. I am a pretty heavy Make user and I think it's great (not least of which because it's so darn ubiquitous). And, not to sound harsh, but if you always "accept that there is a reason some things work in certain ways" without questioning if there may be a better way, well, you will always be stuck with the status quo!
- pawadu 10y ago
  Given the downvotes I assume this is a very touchy subject to some people here... Anyway, are you saying that accepting a tools established input format is to go with the status quo? I am all for breaking new grounds, but is this one really a priority?
  - JdeBP 10y ago
    For a lot of people for a long time, yes. People were complaining about the syntax based upon specific types and amounts of whitespace in the 1980s. Now note from the rest of the very discussion here in front of us that people took action on this almost twenty years ago. And that's just Johnny-come-lately GNU make. Microsoft nmake accepted either spaces or tab characters pretty much a decade before that. And there were plenty of others, from Borland's to multiple shareware versions. Even I got in on the act with my own private reimplementation of make. Somewhere around 1990, if memory serves.
- Millennium 10y ago
  This is true, but it's important not to lose sight of the difference between "questioning if there may be a better way" and bikeshedding. The former is often useful; the latter usually isn't.
adrianN 10y ago
Make 4.2 was released this year. Many people prefer spaces over tabs and many editors insert spaces by default. Most compilers can deal with both spaces and tabs in their parsers, so I assume that it's not an insurmountable problem to make both work for Makefiles, or at least improve the error message. So calling it a "usability hole" is completely accurate.
- pawadu 10y ago
  Most sane editors automatically switch to tabs when editing makefiles. Anyway, my point was, not everything needs to be customizable to your liking. Sometimes things have a set of simple rules you just have to follow. I for one like that we are limited to tabs, otherwise we would have problems with different number of spaces in the same file and by the way exactly how many spaces are a tab? I like 4 but maybe you like 8 or, god forbidden, 2?

by pawadu 10y ago

nneonneo 10y ago

I've already configured my editors and tools to work with Make, and I'm not so much complaining about Make here as I am pointing out one of its most annoying warts. I am a pretty heavy Make user and I think it's great (not least of which because it's so darn ubiquitous). And, not to sound harsh, but if you always "accept that there is a reason some things work in certain ways" without questioning if there may be a better way, well, you will always be stuck with the status quo!

pawadu 10y ago
Given the downvotes I assume this is a very touchy subject to some people here... Anyway, are you saying that accepting a tools established input format is to go with the status quo? I am all for breaking new grounds, but is this one really a priority?
- JdeBP 10y ago
  For a lot of people for a long time, yes. People were complaining about the syntax based upon specific types and amounts of whitespace in the 1980s. Now note from the rest of the very discussion here in front of us that people took action on this almost twenty years ago. And that's just Johnny-come-lately GNU make. Microsoft nmake accepted either spaces or tab characters pretty much a decade before that. And there were plenty of others, from Borland's to multiple shareware versions. Even I got in on the act with my own private reimplementation of make. Somewhere around 1990, if memory serves.
Millennium 10y ago
This is true, but it's important not to lose sight of the difference between "questioning if there may be a better way" and bikeshedding. The former is often useful; the latter usually isn't.

adrianN 10y ago

Make 4.2 was released this year. Many people prefer spaces over tabs and many editors insert spaces by default. Most compilers can deal with both spaces and tabs in their parsers, so I assume that it's not an insurmountable problem to make both work for Makefiles, or at least improve the error message. So calling it a "usability hole" is completely accurate.

pawadu 10y ago
Most sane editors automatically switch to tabs when editing makefiles. Anyway, my point was, not everything needs to be customizable to your liking. Sometimes things have a set of simple rules you just have to follow. I for one like that we are limited to tabs, otherwise we would have problems with different number of spaces in the same file and by the way exactly how many spaces are a tab? I like 4 but maybe you like 8 or, god forbidden, 2?