I have makefile gmake question

[oldfarts]

THere is no listed catagory for gmake, so I just guessed here is where I go.

I have tried a bunch of combination or ifeq,ifneq, and ifdef on make file defined variables and I cannot get any switch to work.
I used, what I thought was every combination of paren's and quotes for
my conditional comparison, and I get some kind of error message on them all.


A make file example:

test = "tom"

all: testmake

.PHONY testmake:
ifeq ($(test),"tom")
@echo "this doesn't work
endif




OR.....................

.PHONY testmake:
ifeq ("$(test)", "tom") OR... ifeq $test "tom" OR ... ifeq ($(tom), $(tom))




Man, nothing works...
I get either syntax error or ifeq not found when I run gmake
?????
WHat am i doing wrong?