Re: make: Unclosed variable specification for

[Berndt Josef Wulf <wulf%ping.net.au@localhost>]

On Tuesday 06 January 2009 06:21:34 David Laight wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 02:10:29AM +1030, Berndt Josef Wulf wrote:
> > I worked around the problem after removal of a "\ " that was part of the
> > PKG_USER variable
> >
> > PKG_USERS=              ${AVAHI_USER}:${AVAHI_GROUP}::Avahi\
> > user:/nonexistent
> >
> > which was changed to
> >
> > PKG_USERS=              ${AVAHI_USER}:${AVAHI_GROUP}::Avahi:/nonexistent
> >
> > I haven't had a look at the parser, its 2:00am and just finishing
> > compilation of VLC, the original task on hand.
>
> You really don't want to give make anything that contains space characters.
> They do rather get used as a global separator.
> In general make syntax has to way to escape spaces (or other characters)
> - except for a few very specific places in variable modifiers.
>
> The '\' in your assignment probably only has any effect when the data
> is finally parsed by a shell.
>
> Quite what the pkgsrc makefiles are doing with PKG_USERS that acyually
> causes grief can be hard to detect. But I suspect that a ' ' in a
> modifier that is used when generating a variable name won't be liked.
>
>       David

G'day,

I suspect in case of net/avahi it must have worked. I didn't follow the tool 
chain changes and hence can't comment on this, but my feeling is that the 
make parser should cope with this situation such as this, or at least make an 
effort to return a somewhat more descriptive error message containing 
information that accurately points to the source of the problem.

As mentioned above, removing the backslash and white space fixed the problem 
to me and enabled me to proceed to rebuild the pkgsrc tree for my system.

BTW: I'm not the maintainer of net/avahi but a user communicating an anomoly 
found whilst updating operating system and pkgsrc applications. So please 
don't blame me... ;-)

cheerio Berndt