FreeBSD Porter's Handbook
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# 12.20 Necessary workarounds

Sometimes it is necessary to work around bugs in software included with older versions of FreeBSD.

- Some versions of make(1) were broken on at least 4.8 and 5.0 with respect to handling comparisons based on `OSVERSION`. This would often lead to failures during `make describe` (and thus, the overall ports `make index`). The workaround is to enclose the conditional comparison in spaces, e.g.:

      if ( ${OSVERSION} > 500023 )

  Be aware that test-installing a port on 4.9 or 5.2 will not detect this problem.

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