How to stringify macros?

[ivan-pi]

I am porting a Make-based project to fpm, where the Makefile included

VERSION = 2.8.9

CC		?= cc
CFLAGS		?= -g -O2
CPPFLAGS	+= -DVERSION=\"$(VERSION)\"

Notice the quote characters around the VERSION macro.

In the fpm manifest I naively changed this to,

version = '2.8.9'

[preprocess]
[preprocess.cpp]
macros=["VERSION={version}"]

However the build breaks, with the error:

<command-line>: error: expected ',' or ';' before numeric constant
app/main.c:94:41: note: in expansion of macro 'VERSION'
   94 | static char ver[]="makedepf90 version " VERSION;
      |                                         ^~~~~~~

Does this mean I need to use stringizing?