When version numbers don't work...

So, I was at work yesterday, trying to troubleshoot a problem we were having with our customer’s build system. For some reason, we’re seeing make fail with a complaint about a missing endif—an error that they’ve never seen. So we proceed with the usual check of tools and found that we were using the same versions of everything. Same gcc, same make, same binutils, same everything… except the Linux distribution.

To make a long story short, we discovered that their build system does not support make 3.80, because 3.80 has a nasty bug that doesn’t allow you to use eval within a conditional. Fedora Core 4 patched make, and low and behold, it works on our customer’s system. However, my distribution—SuSE—did not patch make, and therefore, did not work. So much for supporting make 3.80.