Subject: Re: bug#10956: make-mode.el - improve makefile-warn-suspicious-lines

From: Stefan Monnier <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2012 12:36:48 -0400

> | > Here is a small patch to check any extra whitespace at the beginning of
> | > line.  The patch is against Emacs Vcs-Git ba7322c dated 2012-02-29.
> | I must be missing something.  All it does is change a "\t+$" to
> | "[ \t]+$", so it's not really "at the beginning of line" (tho there's
> | also a "^" in the regexp, so it really only applies to whitespace-only
> | lines).
> | I don't think we want to consider lines made up of spaces as suspicious.
> It would be good if any whitespace only line were flagged as suspicious,
> not just \t, like in:

>     [SPACE][TAB][SPACE]
>     [SPACE][TAB]
>     [TAB][SPACE]
>     [TAB]

> These extra "whitespace" lines are easily missed unless
> whitespace-mode is on.

I notice the absence of a line with only spaces in your examples.
Would you consider such a line as suspicious?
Could you expand on why you consider your examples as suspicious?
I think I'd agree with "\t[ \t]*" since such lines behave identically to
TAB-only lines, but I'm not so sure about lines starting with a space.

Since such suspicious lines end up prompting the user, we had better be
sure they're really risky, otherwise we might bother people for no
good reason.

        Stefan