Re: inconsistency of 'emptiness'?

[Paul D. Smith]

Hi Greg;

I have been reading this, I just haven't had any time to look and see
what's actually going on, so I haven't commented.  I do agree with you
that this is no a shell issue, but is really a problem (of some sort)
with make.

Can you please summarize your ultimate findings into a bug report and
submit it on the Savannah site for me?  That way I'll be able to
remember it.  I'll see if I can determine why make is not handling the
backslash consistently.

I'm leaning towards not fixing the initial issue you reported, where:

  $ make FOO=' '

results in FOO being empty rather than containing a single space,
because to fix that would mean that the behavior of this:

  $ make 'FOO  =  bar'

which currently works "as you'd expect" from a make variable setting and
gives a value of "bar" instead of " bar", would change incompatibly.


But, I do wonder about the backslash issue.

-- 
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