From: "John M. Aldrich" <fighteer AT cs DOT com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject: Re: Ignore TABs in DJGPP Makefiles?
Date: Sat, 29 Mar 1997 02:24:04 -0800
Organization: Two pounds of chaos and a pinch of salt
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To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
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JustIn wrote:
> 
> Greetings! I'm a bit of a newbie to Make and DJGPP.

Then welcome aboard!

> Is there any way to configure Make to use a different separator instead
> of TABs? In most PC editors, they're invisible. They're annoying anyway.
> 
> I've read the documentation for everything I'm using, and haven't found
> a solution.

The reason for this is to ensure compatibility with GNU make on Unix
boxes.  The actual modification to Make is trivial; several people have
done it and all you would need to do is download the source for Make and
make the changes yourself.  But if you use a modified Make, the
makefiles you write for it will not be compatible with other versions of
GNU Make... they won't even be compatible with the standard Make that
comes with DJGPP.  So if you care about distributing your programs in
source form, you should NOT modify your version of Make.  If, on the
other hand, you are just writing for yourself, it shouldn't matter too
much.

As an aside, there are only a few editors that are picky about replacing
tabs with spaces.  DOS Edit is one of these, but it can be convinced to
use real tabs if you load a file that already has tabs in it.  However,
the two most commonly used editors for DJGPP, Emacs and RHIDE, both
preserve tabs in makefiles.

-- 
John M. Aldrich, aka Fighteer I <fighteer AT cs DOT com>

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