Ludovic Courtès writes:

> Eric Bavier <ericbavier@gmail.com> skribis:
>
>> I found an unfortunate bug in the last patch I made to
>> patch-makefile-SHELL that would leave a trailing ' ' at the end of SHELL
>> assignments.  This is fine for most packages, but caused
>> gobject-introspection to fail building for me just now (for the curious:
>> it effectively does an "(apply system* (string-split (string-append SHELL
>> " " "./libtool") #\space))" which causes sh to try to execute "")
>
> AFAIK trailing whitespace in assignments is ignored by ‘make’.
>
> I grepped gobject-introspection out of curiosity and couldn’t find any
> suspicious SHELL assignment.  Do you still have it around?

E.g. gobject-introspection-1.38.0/giscanner/utils.py:124

> The (string=? args "\n") seems specific and non-obvious.

I thought so too.  Your suggestion does work.  With this patch, I was
able to bootstrap and build gobject-introspection.