seafood: @#$%ing trailing white space

February 01, 2005

@#$%ing trailing white space

I cannot believe this error I just encountered using GNU make.

Can you spot it?

SPECIAL_PACKAGE=YES

ifeq "$(SPECIAL_PACKAGE)" "YES" ... then part ... else ... else part ... endif

For some reason the else part was continually invoked. Can you spot the reason? No. Don't even try. You can't spot the reason because spotting involves using your eyes and the thing about whitespace, right, is that you can't see it.

Yup, you guessed it. A trailing whitespace after the YES above caused the problem. Argh!

It reminds me of Holly's¹ poor excuse for not avoiding a cluster of black holes.

"Well the thing about black holes, you see, is they're black. And the thing about space, you see, is that it's also black."

[1] The ship's computer from Red Dwarf