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

[Tim Murphy]

On 11 April 2014 13:48, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2014 11:34:18 +0100
>> From: Tim Murphy <address@hidden>
>> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden>, address@hidden
>>
>> I would love, for example, to have a macro that was evaluated every
>> time an automatic variable was expanded.  It would allow me to hook
>> into make for all sorts of useful purposes.
>>
>> even better if I knew which automatic variable was being expanded so
>> e.g. I could get a list of the targets in the makefile or all the
>> dependencies for target X.
>
> Then SHELL_QUOTE, whatever its name, is not what you want.  What you
> want is a way to write an extension (in C or in Guile) that would hook
> into this expansion, and let you do whatever you need.  IOW, you want
> to ask for infrastructure that would allow extensions to do things
> like that (I don't think we have such an infrastructure right, but
> maybe I'm mistaken).
>
> Let's not (ab)use quoting for things it is not supposed to provide and
> support.

You can't control what people do with a feature that you add to make.
 When you show them a new thing that is possible they will use it. Why
make it a crap one-purpose feature when it can so obviously be made
generally useful and with so little work? I can't think of a reason
other than failure to see ahead or see outside narrow view.

"Feature creep" is just a pejorative term that one can throw at any
unexpected suggestion.  Surely one can distinguish between a useful
generalisation of a very specific concept and an unnecessary feature.
 Surely it's a good thing to generalise a capability so that it can be
used widely?

Regards,

Tim

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