On Mon, 2017-06-12 at 18:26 -0500, David Drinnan wrote: > I have a makefile that works just fine in make 3.81 on RHEL 6.8, but > quickly fails with make 4.1 on Ubuntu 16.04. > > It's failing on this line (details changed, but same logic): > > $(if $(myvar),myothervar := abc,myothervar := xyz) > > with error message: > > build.mk:3: *** empty variable name. Stop.
This is an issue in the parser. I doesn't matter whether myvar is empty or not, that's not what it's complaining about. The problem is that the parser is interpreting this as a target-specific variable assignment, not a normal variable assignment. That is, instead of expanding to: myothervar := abc it's expanding as if you'd written: myothervar : = abc which is a target-specific variable assignment with an empty variable name. This is a bug: it would be greatly helpful if you could file this on Savannah, here: https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?func=additem&group=make As for workarounds, the simplest one is to move the if-statement into the right-hand side; I'm not sure why you need to include the entire assignment in the if-statement. Like this: myothervar := $(if $(myvar),abc,xyz) _______________________________________________ Help-make mailing list Help-make@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-make
