Re: patch to fix missing quoting

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hi Per,

* Per Bothner wrote on Mon, Mar 07, 2005 at 12:02:20AM CET:
> The srcname and the target name were not being quoted.
> This caused problems with Java, where .class files may
> commonly contain '$'.

Thanks for reporting this.  Your patch is not quite correct, as it
causes the $ in the libobj name to be quoted twice.  Thus, the output
name of the .lo file will be wrong.

Before delving into a better patch: Beware that such file names do not
play too well with other tools, notably make and Automake.
(I guess you knew that, but I thought it necessary to mention anyway.)

> Also note that gcj allows multiple input files compiled to a single
> .s or .o file: Thus a useful way to compile a bunch of class files is:
>   gcj -c *.class -o package.o

As I am quite unexperienced with gcj and java in general: What
consequences with respect to exported symbols/linking does this have?

> or with libool:
>   libtool --mode=compile gcj *.class -o package.lo
> It appears that func_mode_compile sets srcfile to the *last*
> source file; setting it to the first source file might be better.
> However, that's not a priority since the multi-source-file mode
> does require specifying -o.

So, does the line fail?  What happens and what should happen?  Note that
at the moment, this kind of use is not supported by libtool.  We might
consider adding support for this if there is a good reason for doing so.
What benefit does multi-source-file mode have?

> I'm not in this list, so please cc any responses to me.

Regards,
Ralf