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

[Frank Heckenbach]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> > Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2014 12:56:19 +0200
> > From: Frank Heckenbach <address@hidden>
> > 
> > > 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.
> > 
> > If we just want to have everything that works to continue working
> > and everything that doesn't to continue not working, we don't need
> > to change anything. ;)
> > 
> > As I detailed before, it will be possible for the user to quote
> > everything manually (if make's internal functions will support
> > multi-word strings), but quite cumbersome, which in practice means
> > users won't do it. (I mean, compared to what would be needed in
> > make, quoting variables in shell scripts is easy, just add "" around
> > your variables, yet I still see so many shell scripts failing to do
> > so.)
> > 
> > So I say if it's left to the user, make should at least provide a
> > way to do this automatically and *by default*. Again, see my
> > SHELL_QUOTE proposal (which would be automatically applied). If the
> > user doesn't want quoting (or needs a different kind of quoting for
> > another interpreter), they can unset or change SHELL_QUOTE,
> > respectively, but for the normal case (sh-compatible interpreter),
> > they shouldn't need to do anything.
> 
> Maybe I'm just confused, but I don't see how what you say contradicts
> what I said in any way.  Maybe some example will help me see the
> light.

I didn't say there was a contradiction. The only one, kind of, is
that I think the quoting should be done automatically by default
(e.g. by having SHELL_QUOTE set by default and used automatically).
This way, rules like this:

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

will not continue to work if $</$@ contain special characters (which
I think is not so bad because they already don't work if $</$@
contain a certain special character, i.e. ').

Apart from this, I think we agree as far as this alternative is
concerned. I'm still willing to consider other alternatives, e.g.
storing and substituting backslash-quoted strings unmodified (based
on your original proposal), but Paul sees to prefer this one.