> At a certain point, I realized that I should be managing this processing somehow, so I thought of using a simple Makefile.
I don't understand why one would think that make would be a good tool for this...
> Demanding the support of spaces in filenames significantly complicates code as simple space delimination no longer works and other delimination schemes are much more error prone -- forgetting balancing quotes, any one?
Yes this is a limitation of make, but not a million other tools out there.
Make is not a panacea, no tool is - pressing a tool into a job it is un-suited for because you understand it is "Not good" (trade mark and copy right pending).
This is the classic case of having a hammer and a screw -
> I don't understand why one would think that make would be a good tool for this...
Why not? To me, it sounds like a perfect use of Make. You have a number of files that should be processed somehow (presumably by invoking a certain tool for each and every file) and produce another set of files.
Whether it's C-files to compiled binaries, or some source files to PDF:s, make seems very well suited for the job. Except yeah, perhaps, spaces.
Yeah make seems like a great first tool to grab in this case. But apparently some of the requirements of this current usecase don't play well with make. Too bad, but it doesn't mean make is somehow a bad tool...it just doesn't fit all problems.
Given that make isn't working well in this case due to spaces, I would personally probably use something like find and sed in a bash script to just get all the files and convert them to pdf. (Obviously this won't work if your system doesn't have these tools though...)
I don't understand why one would think that make would be a good tool for this...
> Demanding the support of spaces in filenames significantly complicates code as simple space delimination no longer works and other delimination schemes are much more error prone -- forgetting balancing quotes, any one?
Yes this is a limitation of make, but not a million other tools out there.
Make is not a panacea, no tool is - pressing a tool into a job it is un-suited for because you understand it is "Not good" (trade mark and copy right pending).
This is the classic case of having a hammer and a screw -