Patch [1] reminded me of a technique that was used long ago in my early C/C++ projects at Lucent Technologies (for those who still remember the company :) ). In those projects, multi-line lists in Makefiles were always terminated with $(ENDLIST), where ENDLIST is just a global dummy variable.
The benefits are:
* It clearly marks the end of a list.
* Adding or removing items does not require worrying about a trailing “\”.
* Changes at the end of a list do not introduce extra diff noise from adjusting backslashes.
This is not a new invention on my part. I’m simply proposing to bring this existing technique into the PostgreSQL source tree.
In this patch, I’ve only applied $(ENDLIST) to the Makefiles touched by [1]. If this approach is acceptable, I can follow up with a patch to apply it more broadly.
Note that since ENDLIST is defined in Makefile.global.in, this change requires rerunning ./configure.
