Re: Output quoting (was: Re: Possible solution for special characters in makefile paths)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Paul Smith <address@hidden>
> Date: Wed, 09 Apr 2014 09:41:21 -0400
> 
> The interpreters are where things get hairy.  The problems are many.
> First, there's the fact that we don't know how to quote properly for any
> random interpreter: they all have different rules.  They even have
> different characters which are considered "special" and in need of
> quoting!

We've been there during past discussions.  My opinion is: decode the
string, and let the user quote it if needed.  This way, rules like this:

>   %.x: %.y
>           process '$<' -o '$@'

continue to work (or not ;-) as they did before.

The only exception from this rule is when Make itself generates the
shell command internally, without any user control.  Like in built-in
rules, for example.  In these cases, we must quote ourselves, but that
could be done in the rule itself, so that again only decoding is
needed.

If the above doesn't cover some use cases, let's discuss them.