Re: 15autotest-more-info-prettier.diff

[Akim Demaille]

 > address@hidden writes:
 >> This is the same problem you are having with patsubst and regex
 >> right? I'm not sure that I understand the criterion for determining
 >> whether a builtin is underquoting.  Are you saying that the argument
 >> collecter needs to be more careful with quotes, or that the
 >> internals of some builtins should add quotes before they shipout
 >> their results?

 > The latter.  For example, you need to be able to take an arbitrary
 > string and use those builtins to select a part of it.  Currently
 > you can't do it, since the resulting string isn't quoted, and is
 > rescanned so the quotes are lost.

Absolutely.

 > Also, there needs to be a mechanism for handling arbitrary strings,
 > including strings with unbalanced quotes.  This is a continual problem
 > with Autoconf; it causes lots of problems with users.

Definitely.  Once these issues fixed in M4, we can proceed onto the
next "bugs": mostly bottlenecks that would dramatically speed up
Autoconf if they were addressed.

For instance, m4_foreach, m4_map would certainly help.  Once the
module system stable, I think we can proceed to having M4 modules in
Autoconf.