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by rkangel 1932 days ago
The syntax has one major insurmountable problem - it uses space as a separator and so doesn't allow spaces in target names and therefore doesn't allow spaces in filenames.

Yes, there are workarounds for some situations, but none of them work in all cases and no-one ever applies them consistently.
1 comments
dahfizz 1932 days ago
That isn't a "major insurmountable" problem. Its a minor annoyance - just don't have spaces in your file names.
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rkangel 1932 days ago
Or in your directory names both in your project, or in any parent folder. There's absolutely no reason why Windows shouldn't be able to call the folder "My Documents" but it broke a whole generation of builds that people tried to do in their home directory.

Spaces in filenames is a perfectly reasonable thing to want to do. They are supported on all three major platforms, but make just throws up it's hands and doesn't care. Yes, it is workable around, but it would be nice if it wasn't.

It's an annoyance with make overall, but if we're talking about the syntax specifically then yes I would call that a "major insurmountable problem".

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steveklabnik 1932 days ago
One time, I had a work-issued laptop where they filled out my user account. They used spaces in my username. This meant that I had a space in every single path.

It caused so many issues. But mostly with developer tooling, like Make, that assumes these sorts of things. Most programs worked just fine.

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a1369209993 1931 days ago
> One time, I had a work-issued laptop [which I did not have root on].

Well there's your problem right there. That kind of shit needs to stop, and making companies that perpetrate it less able to develop software (and thus less profitable) is one of the only things people who don't directly interact with such a company can do to discourage it. (Not that that's in any way a good strategy, but to the tiny extent it has any bearing on makefile syntax in the first place, it's a argument against supporting spaces in filenames.)

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steveklabnik 1931 days ago
I did have root on it. It was just set up for me by IT. Having root doesn’t change my account name.
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