getting carried with "strip" in string comparisons?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  from the project that i inherited, the makefiles are saturated with
string comparisons of the form:

  ifeq ($(strip $(VARNAME)),whatever)

rather than

  ifeq ($(VARNAME),whatever)

i realize that this is just being robust and careful about leading or
trailing whitespace but, seriously, after a while, it gets just a bit
overwhelming to see dozens, if not hundreds, of string comparisons
written this way.

  does everyone do it this way?  that is, would this be considered a
best practice?

rday