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

[Tim Murphy]

On 11 April 2014 14:13, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2014 14:02:59 +0100
>> From: Tim Murphy <address@hidden>
>> Cc: Frank Heckenbach <address@hidden>, address@hidden
>>
>> > 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.
>
> No, but I can tell them "if it hurts, don't do that".
>
>>  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?
>
> There's nothing wrong with one-purpose features.  Each feature should
> do its intended job well, no more, no less.
> I don't see how your suggestion is a generalization of file-name
> quoting.

Filename quoting is just a special case of hooking into automatic
variable expansion. It is obviously more desirable to implement the
higher level concept.  Otherwise we would have special functions for
every possible usecase and make would be a complicated mess.  How can
I say it better? I don't know. perhaps an argument by absurdity:
should we have a special funtion to add 1 to a number and then another
special function to add 2 and so on ad infinitum?

Regards,

Tim



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