There appears to be some historic issue with using the syntax -DX=\""Y\"" (escaped double) on windows and not other platforms. Other platforms seem to mostly use -DX='"Y"' (single over double), however all platforms used both in some places. So something that did not work on windows has started working as far as I can tell, perhaps a very old MKS had a problem here.

Recent makefile work has shown a value to converting to make 3.81 (the latest GNU make) rather than the current 3.78.1 minimum requirement (3.78.1 is 10 years old). However, GNU make 3.81 and the Windows MKS shells seem to have a problem with using escaped double quotes on command lines. This problem is documented at
http://forums.java.net/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=365396&tstart=0
The GNU make README has a workaround, however I'm not sure we want to use it.

The good news is that the single over double usage works in all cases now, so the proposal is to consistently change all these patterns to single over double and try and have people avoid escaped double quotes.