Unable to use make when building fbida (fbi) from source

Question

I am trying to install fbida (Fbi), framebuffer image viewer, on Ubuntu 16.04. I am trying to build from source fbida v2.13 (www.kraxel.org/releases/fbida/) since when I do install using sudo apt-get install fbi, it installs v2.09.

While using the make command, I get the error: Make.config:1: *** empty variable name. Stop.

Prior to using the make command, I installed all the dependencies by using the following command below. I am assuming these the are dependencies based on the instructions provided in a similar project called fim.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential 
sudo apt-get install autoconf autoconf-archive automake autotools-dev bison ctags flex groff g++ libaa1-dev libdjvulibre-dev libgif-dev libimlib2-dev libjpeg-dev libncurses5-dev libpng-dev libpoppler-cpp-dev libpoppler-dev libreadline-dev libsdl-dev libspectre-dev libtiff-dev libtool m4 make txt2html libexif-dev

Below is the exact error I get when using the make command:

dev@dev-VirtualBox:~/Downloads/fbida-2.13-1$ make
checking for libdir name ... lib
checking for X11 app-defaults prefix ... /etc/X11
checking for endian.h ... yes
checking for linux/fb.h ... yes
checking for libexif/exif-log.h ... yes
checking for fopencookie ... yes
checking for strsignal ... yes
checking for pcd_open in pcd ... no
checking for DGifOpenFileName in gif ... yes
checking for libpng (using pkg-config) ... yes
checking for libtiff-4 (using pkg-config) ... yes
checking for libwebp (using pkg-config) ... no
checking for sane_init in sane ... no
checking for curl_easy_init in curl ... no
checking for lirc_init in lirc_client ... no
checking for XmStringGenerate in Xm ... no
checking for libjpeg version ... 80

Make.config written, edit if needed

Make.config:1: *** empty variable name.  Stop.

Below is the content of my Make.config file.

dev@dev-VirtualBox:~/Downloads/fbida-2.13-1$ cat Make.config 
-e LIB      := lib
RESDIR      := /etc/X11
HAVE_ENDIAN_H   := yes
HAVE_LINUX_FB_H := yes
HAVE_NEW_EXIF   := yes
HAVE_GLIBC  := yes
HAVE_STRSIGNAL  := yes
HAVE_LIBPCD := no
HAVE_LIBGIF := yes
HAVE_LIBPNG := yes
HAVE_LIBTIFF    := yes
HAVE_LIBWEBP    := no
HAVE_LIBSANE    := no
HAVE_LIBCURL    := no
HAVE_LIBLIRC    := no
HAVE_MOTIF  := no
JPEG_VER        := 80

Answer 1

This is caused by using a non-bash shell as your default. a line in Autoconf.mk that reads:

@echo -e "$(make-config-q)" > $@

will print the -e literally in the dash shell.