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

[Paul Smith]

Hi all; I've been reading everything (thank you for the energy you're
putting into this) but I won't have time to formulate a complete reply
for a day or two.

I think I understand peoples' positions and so I'm going to generate an
email or two that discuss the main ideas, most especially dealing with
compatibility, POSIX standards issues, C/Guile API issues, etc. once
I've thought about it a bit more.


On Tue, 2014-02-25 at 21:09 +0100, Frank Heckenbach wrote:
> > Why do you think this will be needed?
> 
> When the makefile explicitly single-/double quotes stuff:
> 
> FOO = a'()'b
> all: $(FOO); cat $(FOO)
> 
> If make doesn't handle ', it will depend on a file called «a'()'b»
> including quotes, and give this on the command line, which to the
> shell means «a()b», i.e. a different file name.

This seems like a bit of circular reasoning to me: we want to support
quoting because if we don't then quoting won't be supported :-).

I don't immediately see the advantage in having the full range of shell
quoting capabilities in make variable values.  Makefiles are not shell
scripts; they just contain shell scripts.

We need a way to quote special characters to make, and a single quoting
mechanism should enough IMO.  In fact, additional quoting methods will
need strong justification before I'd consider them because the more
quoting options we support the more complex the code is and the more
backward-compatibility issues we will encounter.

What does the extra quoting buy us, exactly?