Re: MAKECMDGOALS and spaces

[David]

On Thu, 18 Feb 2021 at 04:36, Sébastien Hinderer
<Sebastien.Hinderer@inria.fr> wrote:
> Kaz Kylheku (gmake) (2021/02/13 11:44 -0800):

> > Pardon the pontificating, but 've never worked with or seen
> > a Makefile that had spaces in a target name; that kind of
> > thing is best avoided.

> I don't like spaces especially, either. But it seems it's not really
> possible to claim one fully supports building on Windows if not
> supporting directories with spaces in their names.

That line of thinking is not limited to one operating system.
If that logic is correct, then apparently it's not possible
"to claim one fully supports building on" any operating system.
I think reality disagrees.

> For instance, one may
> want to install to a subdirectory of "C:\Program files".

That seems like a reasonable thing to want.

> In such a
> scenario, one thing that would seem natural to do, at least to me, is to
> have targets to creat the required directories.

Also reasonable.

> I am suspecting make would have a hard time handlign this properly, but
> if there is any recommendation I'd be very interested.

These comments are more my reactions or possible ideas than recommendations:
1) Don't use stupid operating systems.
2) I haven't used any Microsoft OS since Windows 2000. But from a
few seconds of research it appears that a few versions of Windows might
support symbolic or even hard links. Perhaps there could be a recipe in
the makefile that creates a link (without spaces in its name) to
"C:\Program files",
and then the path to the install target directory could be specified
using the link.
Perhaps the link could even be removed after installation.