Trailing backslashes in Makefile

[Michael H. Warfield]

Alexandre Oliva enscribed thusly:
> On Dec  3, 1998, David Collier-Brown <davecb at Canada.Sun.COM> wrote:

> > Alexandre Oliva wrote:
> >> This problem affects the `make' programs of Solaris 2.5 

> > 	I think you have an odd make on your Solaris...  
> > 	I just tested it on 2.5 and \-extended lines
> > 	are procesed normally.

> I'm not talking about \-extended lines.  The problem is when a line
> ended with a backslash is followed by a blank line.  This breaks
> various make programs :-(

	The problem there is that the blank line becomes part of the
"continued" line (the \) and you are then no longer left with the
prerequisit blank separator line between it and the next...  If there
were two blank lines, it would probably work.  I'm actually surprised
that gnu make accepts this since it implies that either they have 1)
special case code for a continuation line followed by a terminating
blank line and it can serve a dual purpose or 2) they are not requiring
a blank separating line between dependency sections of the Makefile.
I could envision circumstances where either of those two conditions
could cause gnu make to fail on classically legitimate, although highly
unusual or artificial, Makefile structures

> -- 
> Alexandre Oliva  http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~oliva  aoliva@{acm.org}
> oliva@{dcc.unicamp.br,gnu.org,egcs.cygnus.com,samba.org}
> Universidade Estadual de Campinas, SP, Brasil

	Mike
-- 
 Michael H. Warfield    |  (770) 985-6132   |  mhw at WittsEnd.com
  (The Mad Wizard)      |  (770) 925-8248   |  http://www.wittsend.com/mhw/
  NIC whois:  MHW9      |  An optimist believes we live in the best of all
 PGP Key: 0xDF1DD471    |  possible worlds.  A pessimist is sure of it!