On Thu, 2022-10-27 at 09:58 -0400, Paul Smith wrote: > If make is not parsing a variable (because you've escaped the "$" > that introduces a variable) then special characters are not treated > specially.
I should say that Dmitry filed a bug about this behavior (not this exactly but a similar behavior): https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?60799 He provided a patch but I'm still thinking about it because it is a behavior change. It won't be in 4.4 but maybe later. However, I don't think that change by itself will help you with this problem. It might be possible to fix this specific case without compat problems since it's a variable assignment.
