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

[Frank Heckenbach]

Tim Murphy wrote:

> On 11 April 2014 11:54, Frank Heckenbach <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> You can't control what people do in SHELL_QUOTE.

Why not? I'm not saying whether we should, we can surely require
SHELL_QUOTE to be side-effect-free if we want to.

> They can do whatever
> they like - they can expand any function that make has and use it for
> purposes that you didn't imagine.   You might say "no no no don't do
> that" but after the feature is out there your control over it is gone.
>  So it's worth thinking about the other possible uses and seeing if
> one can make it a little more general and fit many purposes.
>
> Any function that is being expanded for an automatic variable can
> contain any actions, right? It can call $(file) or $(eval) or any
> number of odd things potentially with side effects. Hence it can be
> used for more than your suggested use case and in the end that is what
> will happen when people realise that it is possible.

Then please give some relevant examples.

Basically, what you said so far is, if SHELL_QUOTE worked
differently (different arguments), is applied in different
situations (not only in recipe substitutions) and not in some
situations intended (only automatic variables), then people could
use it for different (and so far, ill-specified) purposes.

Sorry, but I can say that about any feature. If make had a GUI,
would do text editing and not run shell commands, people could use
it as a word processor. ;)

See also: feature creep