Re: ensure a VPATH build

[Keith Marshall]

On Saturday 18 February 2006 12:53 pm, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> > > Could you confirm that the bug also exists with assignments?
> > 
> > I'm not sure.  I'd never actually encountered the problem with bash,
> > before this particular MSYS bug report.  However, I had previously
> > encountered it in a groff bug report pertaining to pdfroff, where
> > backticks withing quotes broke the groff build on several systems,
> > mostly various flavours of BSD, I think.
>
> Could you point me to the bug report?
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2005-06/msg00032.html

If you follow the thread, you will see that this one was the double 
quotes nested within a double quoted backticked substitution;  I fixed it 
by moving the backticked expression outside of the outer quotes.

You are right: the MSYS bug is subtly different, but *can* be avoided by 
adopting a similar quoting style.  Perhaps I read more into the autoconf 
manual snippet I cited earlier, than was intended by its author.  
Nevertheless, it does seem that avoiding backquoted expressions within 
double quotes where possible, can lead to more robust and portable 
scripts.

Regards,
Keith.