support of whitespace in a variable name

[Daniel Amous]

Hello,

we have a pb recompiling a project based on makefiles in which most 
variable names have space  character within  (I am not talking about 
heading or trailing space);
This project and makefiles are not new but the last time it was built 
(successfully) was around 2004 (maybe not the same GNU make version as 
today ? we don't know) and the people that handled this code are no more 
in the company and we need now to rebuild the project. The build context 
is GNU make within cygwin env.
We get an error :    ....../Makefile.inc:47: *** missing separator. Stop.
on the line of the 1st variable with a space within.
If we remove this space (or replace with '_') the get the same error on 
the next variable with space.
I looked in the GNU Make documentation and also searched articles on the 
Web but could not find any tip about this.

The people that initially wrote these makefilles deliberately chose this 
strategy to use space with variable name, see below extract. There are 
several makefiles like this and many many variables following the same 
schema.  (so replacing the space in all the variables of all the makefile 
is not our preferred strategy for now).

So do you know what could be the settings to do to allow GNU make within 
cygwin context  to accept space in variable name ?
Our cygwin version:  version 2.761
Our GNU Make version: 3.82.90


### Configurable settings 
---------------------------------------------------

# Template Flags format
# <Flag name> <platform> <threads flag> <debug flag> = <value>
# platform: name given by uname -s
# threads flag: 0 means mono-thread, 1 means multi-thread
# debug flag: 0 means production code, 1 means debug code


### AMD_THREADS
# 0 Single Thread setting
# 1 Multiple Threads setting
# 2 Mulithread DLL setting (only with native win32 compiler)
# Default value: 0

AMD_THREADS ?= 0


### AMD_RTTI
# 0 RTTI disabled
# 1 RTTI enabled
# Default value: 1 for C++, 0 for C

amd_rtti c = 0
amd_rtti cxx = 1
AMD_RTTI = $(amd_rtti $(AMD_LANG))


### AMD_EXCEPTION
# 0 Exceptions disabled
# 1 Exception enabled
# Default value: 1 for C++, 0 for C

amd_exception c = 0
amd_exception cxx = 1
AMD_EXCEPTION = $(amd_exception $(AMD_LANG))

etc.......

Best regards

Daniel Amous
Unit Manager, Programme Management, Selling Platform, Core Activities 
SEP, Development Sales & e-Commerce Platform 
Amadeus sas 
T: +33(0)4-92-94-63-37 
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