I don't think I've ever been bitten by confusion over tabs vs other whitespace in a Makefile—Emacs out of the box is a great Makefile IDE. But I can understand

I don't think I've ever been bitten by confusion over tabs vs other whitespace in a Makefile—Emacs out of the box is a great Makefile IDE. But I can understand the frustration if you only have access to lesser tools. I should add that learning make well has been a great boon for my career. It's an incredibly powerful and elegant tool, assuming your project can inhabit the subset of projects that will never, ever have paths containing spaces.