Re: multiple assignments on one line?

[Alexis Huxley]

> > Unfortunately $(shell ...) is stripping out the newlines and
> > making the multiple assignments - one per line - into one single
> > assignment with a very long right-hand side. 
> 
> I have done something similar by replacing the spaces with an unused
> character and then substituting back the space.  I am retyping the
>
> ...
>
> $(foreach var $(shell branding_vars),$(eval $(subst @,${space},${var})))

Brilliant! Willingly letting $(shell ...) change newlines to spaces,
accepting that space now means newline - having first changed spaces
to something else so there is no ambiguity! Brilliant!

In fact I refined your idea a bit so the external script remains
writing *pure* Make assigments and the single line does both
the escaping ( $(shell ...)'s own conversion of newline to space
and using sed to convert space to '@') and the unescaping ( $(subst
...) to unescape the spaces and $(foreach ...) to effectively unescape
newlines by passing assigments one by one to $(eval ...)).

Here's the generator:

        graces$ cat get-vars
        #!/bin/sh
        echo "FRUITS = apple banana"
        echo "VEGETABLES = asparagus beetroot"
        graces$ 

Here's the Makefile (with some long variable names for clarity):

        graces$ cat Makefile
        COLONED_ASSIGNMENT_ONLY_TO_FORCE_IMMEDIATE_EXECUTION := $(foreach 
PACKED_ASSIGNMENT,$(shell get-vars | sed 's/ /@/g'),$(eval $(subst @, 
,$(PACKED_ASSIGNMENT))))
        default:
                @echo FRUITS = $(FRUITS)
                @echo VEGETABLES = $(VEGETABLES)
        graces$

And here's it working:

        graces$ make
        FRUITS = apple banana
        VEGETABLES = asparagus beetroot
        graces$


Brilliant! 

John Graham-Cumming <address@hidden>'s solution looked fine too, but
I forgot to mention one thing which makes the above solution more
suitable; namely:

The whole purpose of what I'm trying to do is abstract a lot of
Makefile intelligence into an external script (a script rather than
a Makefile because the former can be found in the $PATH without the
user needing to have to set any additional environment variables) and
therefore it makes sense that whatever loads the abstracted content
should be below a certain level of complexity - ideally one line -
otherwise I'm tempted to say "This is so complex I should abstract it
in to an include-able Makefile (whose purpose is to load other complex
stuff I already abstracted in to another include-able Makefile)"

Many thanks for the quick an extremely helpful responses!

Alexis