Re: characters allowed in --enable-*/--with-*

[Karl Berry]

I was merely musing on my experiences in that initial reply, not making
final proclamations or anything.  Sorry if I gave that impression.  I
realize there are advantages to allowing +, which you have ably
enumerated :).

I'm ok with proposing to rms that + be allowed, along with: -_.A-Za-z

I wasn't actually aware that . was allowed, but it seems ok to me too.

    Isn't this an indication that *not* allowing the '+' character makes
    it hard for the user to guess?     

Certainly.  If + had been universally supported in all needed contexts
from the beginning, that would have been much better.  We don't live in
that world, though.

    In my experience, '+' characters cause no more hassles than '-' and '.'.

I was referring exactly to the endless confusion/speculation by users
about whether + is used literally, or xx, or pp, or plusplus, or some
other variation.  Perhaps allowing + in --with will allow us to reduce
that confusion, instead of increase it.  We'll see.

Just to mention it: of course + is special in one way that - and . are
not: it's used to encode a space in some cases in url's.  (This doesn't
seem like a serious drawback to me as far as --with goes, but just for
the record.)

Thanks,
karl