Why does dracut not add leading and trailing spaces?

[ChristophSchmidpeter]

According to Gentoo's Dracut wiki, within Dracut .conf files, assignments of parameter (lists) like add_dracutmodules must contain leading and trailing spaces. E.g.
add_dracutmodules+=" module " # Note leading and trailing spaces

Assuming this is correct, are there cases where one intentionally should/wants to omit leading and/or trailing spaces? If not, wouldn't it make sense to have Dracut automatically insert leading and trailing spaces where appropriate for improved convenience and to avoid a potential source of (user) error?

[dtardon]

This is not possible to do with the current way of processing of configuration files. The problem is that the "configuration" files are not really configuration--they are shell scripts which are sourced into dracut's shell process. IOW, from dracut's POV, each config. file is an opaque unit. The best dracut could do is to append a space to all the "list" variables (add_dracutmodules etc.) after reading each config. file, but that wouldn't help if the same variable is used multiple times in a config. file...