Re: inconsistency of 'emptiness'?

[gk]

At 05:23 PM 1/28/2003 +0100, Der Herr Hofrat wrote:

> I still think it is a shell problem not make
>
> rtl11:~ $ make FOO=" "
> origin of FOO is: command line
> FOO is empty
> rtl11:~ $ make FOO="\ "
> origin of FOO is: command line
> FOO is not empty
>
> and the value of FOO is one blank in the second case. So I guess it IS the
> shells way of expanding things thats causing the problem.
>
> hofrat

I don't think so. My shell script example was intended to show that the 
SHELL is not preventing a simple shell script from seeing the space that 
make is NOT SEEING. make is parsing the command line variables, not as 
variables per se, but as parameters - this is where the problem comes in.

You give a good example above. My suspicion is that this seemingly 
inconsistent behavior (as viewed compared with environmental variables and 
with other programs which accept command line parameters), is actually sort 
of understandable if you think of command-line variables as essentially the 
same as makefile variables: make never sees any leading space in makefile 
variable assignments. I think that is what is happening here. But I still 
think it is unfortunately odd: methinks it would be better for make to 
behave the same when making assignments from command line or from the 
environment.


- Greg Keraunen
http://www.xmake.org
http://www.xmlmake.com