On Tue, Feb 3, 2026, at 12:09 PM, Bruno Haible wrote: > Zack Weinberg wrote: >> The ‘makefile_TAB_only_indentation’ syntax check objects to some of >> the whitespace in maint.mk. Fix attached. > > No, I object to this patch. Gnulib uses spaces-only indentation > for most of its files, and 1-level-of-tab for Makefiles, for the > sake/benefit of AIX 'make'. We have abandoned the tab-only or > multiple-tabs-then-spaces indentation because it makes editing > generally harder, since 2009.
I'm actually 100% in favor of abandoning mixed-tabs-and-spaces indentation. However, note that most of maint.mk is still using the convention that the makefile_TAB_only_indentation check expects, and the specific rule modified by the patch I sent had one line that was *all* spaces (which technically doesn't matter because it was a continuation line). So I think, if you're going to reject this patch, you should instead convert maint.mk to strictly 1 tab at the beginning of each *recipe* line (continuation or not) and no tabs elsewhere, and then either change the makefile_TAB_only_indentation syntax check rule to enforce *that* convention, or mark it as optional and add an alternative rule that does enforce that convention. I'm going to leave my patch applied in the Autoconf tree for now as this is easier than remembering how cfg.mk works. (Personally I'd like to see this entire mess converted to Perl or Python.) zw
