7 Mar
2021
7 Mar
'21
3:40 a.m.
On Sun, 7 Mar 2021, Dave Horsfall wrote:
(Straying into COFF territory here)
On Fri, 5 Mar 2021, John Gilmore wrote:
I used to have my own system for doing "make"-like builds which was a lot
more primitive and just relied on a tool that returned an errorlevel based
on whether a file needed to be rebuilt.
Of course, that was because I used an editor that destroyed tabs. :/ Damn
it, M$...
-uso.
The one that got me was make(1). Being used to
text editors that used
"tab" as a command rather than a literal character, I proposed a fix early
on at Sun that would allow leading spaces as well as tabs in Makefiles. (I
think this was in the Unisoft Unix days, pre-BSD.) Bill Shannon actually
put it into their source tree. But in a few days or weeks, he took it back
out, because he realized that Makefiles built on Suns using leading spaces
wouldn't work anywhere else.
I loathe make's distinguishment between tabs and spaces; they look the same
on the screen, and last I looked computers are supposed to serve humans and
not the other way around.
-- Dave