technical Makefile question

[walt]

On Mon, 27 Dec 2004, walt wrote:

> including in lib/Xau...
> "Makefile", line 917: Missing dependency operator
>
> The Makefile in question was newly generated by imake:
> (This is on my gcc34 machine, BTW.)

As usual I've (partly) answered my own question just by thinking :o/

At first I believed this error was compiler-independent, but that
was due to a stupid blunder -- in fact this is a gcc34-specific error.

So -- I'm guessing that the problem is that __FreeBSD__ is not
defined and the resulting Makefile was generated for linux by
default.

My *real* puzzle is why exporting a value for __FreeBSD__ in the
shell environment fails to satisfy the 'ifdefs' in the code.

I've tried using -D__FreeBSD__ on the command line, and exporting
__FreeBSD__=1 to the environment, and even setting a value in
bsd.port.mk, but the compiler still behaves as if  __FreeBSD__ is
undefined.

Can anyone clue me in, please?  Thanks!