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

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2014 17:09:30 +0100
> From: Frank Heckenbach <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden
> 
> - In the makefile (as in this example): Take it literally, including
>   any quotes.
> 
> - As a result of $(wildcard) or similar functions: Make must insert
>   quoting as necessary (so the shell will interpret it as the actual
>   filenames). As discussed, there are several ways to do this,
>   either backslash every character, or single-quote the whole
>   string, escaping embedded single-quotes. I'd prefer the latter for
>   readability, but that's an implementation detail.
> 
> - Targets from the command-line: Same as $(wildcard).
> 
> - Values from the command-line or environment variables (I think the
>   two are equivalent): Now that's a little problem. One might like
>   to quote them like the previous items, so something like
>     make FOO="my file name"
>   would work as intended. But that would break compatibility when a
>   variable is actually meant to contain a list of filenames, or see
>   my LOG_START example for another case that must not be turned into
>   a single word. So I'd say since make has no way of knowing what a
>   variable is meant to be, it must assume separate words and store
>   it as is (also for backward-compatibility). If something else is
>   intended, the user will need to do additional quoting:
>     make FOO="'my file name'" BAR="file1 file2 file3"

I think we will need to provide a quoting function, something like a
wrapper for the gnulib's quotearg module, since programming quoting in
Make-ish is not easy, if at all possible.