Re: make: avoid breaking backwards compatability

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost>]

On Mon, Sep 01, 2014 at 08:05:48PM +0000, David Holland wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 01, 2014 at 12:15:58PM -0700, Simon Gerraty wrote:
>  > The recent changes to suffix white-space handling are cool,
>  > but they break a number of existing makefiles.
>  > [...]
>  > 
>  > A target that has a \ at the end of the last line of its script now breaks.
>  > Such targets were valid until recently and the practice is not uncommonn
>  > since it reduces noise in diff's when additional commands added
>  > (eg. great log sed commands)
> 
> Oh please, that's a bug in the makefile. What does an escaped nothing
> mean? If you're so concerned about the diffs, stick a blank line at
> the end.
> 
> And yeah, that means changing some makefiles; if you've been doing
> something so obviously invalid you need to expect that. Sorry.

I disagree on this. I have seen the "fix" in bin/sh committed by xtos,
but I don't agree with the behavior change. The cases I know of did not
involve variable expansion, just plain backslash at the end of the
commands. Semantically there *is* a newline here, so breaking it is
wrong.

Joerg