maintainers of debian lua package told that loop occurs because Makefile cannot parse -DDEB_HOST_MULTIARCH=\"x86_64-linux-gnu\" -I/usr/include/lua5.1 returned by pkg-config --cflags lua5.1. they say that this part of Makefile gets puzzled by the above: quote:= " escall= $(subst $$,\$$,$(subst $(quote),\$(quote),$1)) exec_cmd= $(if $($(quiet)_cmd_$(1)),\ @echo "$(call escall,$($(quiet)_cmd_$(1)))" ;) $(cmd_$(1)) -- juha