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

[Tim Murphy]

Note that this use of cat is not "space safe"
> FOO = a'()'b
> all: $(FOO); cat $(FOO)

It should be:
> all: $(FOO); cat "$(FOO)"

... in which case the shell would act the same as make does.
Programmers should be responsible for what they put in the recipe
without make having to second-guess them.

Regards,

Tim


On 26 February 2014 07:17, Paul Smith <address@hidden> wrote:
> 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?
>
>
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