See page 184 of the Unix Haters Handbook, http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf. That has to be the most obstinate bug in the world.
Helpful comments in the source code:
if (wtype == w_eol)
{
if (*p2 != '\0') /* There's no need to be ivory-tower about this: check for
one of the most common bugs found in makefiles... */
fatal (fstart, _("missing separator%s"),
(cmd_prefix == '\t' && !strneq (line, " ", 8))
? "" : _(" (did you mean TAB instead of 8 spaces?)"));
continue;
}
So they detect it, and they'd rather insult the user. But "no ivory tower", no no, we will just not parse a space when the ATT code only parsed tabs. It's a "makefile bug", not a "make bug". Sure.
And for the fun, I just tried to build make. On MacOSX, supposedly some kind of Unix that I head a few folks actually use to build stuff. Could be a prime citizen. OK, no configure out of the box with the git repository. OK. No makefile, obviously. No install script. Bogus information in the INSTALL that tells me to run nonexistent configure. Well, running the magic incantation, aclocal ; autoheader; automake ; autoconf. Still does not work, missing files like config/compile. Running automake --add-missing. Whatever. Still an error where it's looking for po/Makefile.in.in. Huh?
So to build make, I need not just make, but four other utilities and makefile input inputs? WTF?
Make alone was bad enough. But it was not good enough for portability, so autoconf was added. But it did not work so automake was added. But it did not work, so... And now at version 4.0, we have a system here you need half a dozen commands just to build the damn thing, and it still does not build out of the box. Seriously?
This whole archaic build system is doomed. Go cmake.