Re: Fix quoting in autoconf --help=recursive

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Wed, 2004-08-18 at 19:24, Paul Eggert wrote:
> Ralf Corsepius <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > The patch below fixes a quoting bug, which causes
> > autoconf --help=recursive
> > to fail on config subdirs, if the current working directory contains
> > white spaces.
> 
> But there are zillions of places where Autoconf and Automake assume
> that the working and source directories don't contain spaces.
I know ;)

However, this case seems to have become common on Cygwin/Win, where
users seem to prefer building packages under  "Documents and Settings",
and users start to complain about it.
(cf. http://www.rtems.org/ml/rtems-users/2004/august/msg00057.html)

>   Why
> focus on this one?  That is, what usage of Autoconf will work if this
> change is applied, but doesn't work now?
White spaces in builddir.

I.e. I am concentrating on VPATH builds where builddir contains white
spaces while the sourcedir doesn't.

E.g.:
# pwd
/home/testing/a b c
# ../package/configure 

Surprisingly, autoconf-2.59 seems to support this case pretty nicely,
except of some places where it internally uses constructs like this:

savdir=`pwd`
cd <somewhere>
[do something]
cd $savdir

Systematically patching autoconf *.m4's to use cd "$savdir" seems to
remedy these cases. Some of these spots already seem to be fixed in
autoconf-CVS, so backporting them to autoconf-2.59 to get this working
seems to be straight forward.

[cf.
http://www.rtems.org/cgi-bin/gnatsweb.pl?database=RTEMS&cmd=view&pr=672
http://www.rtems.org/cgi-bin/gnatsweb.pl?database=RTEMS&cmd=view&pr=673
(user guest, password guest)
]

> The reason I ask is that I want to systematically squash all the bugs
> that might affect your case, but I don't have the time to fix all of
> Autoconf and Automake to support file names with spaces in all
> circumstances.
Neither do I. Therefore, I am currently focusing on the case above and
am primarily testing with the RTEMS source tree.

I have not yet tried touching 
* white spaces in <srcdir> (/<dir>/a\ b\ c/configure)
[If time permits, I might consider looking into this case, too.]
and
* white spaces in autoconf installation dirs 
(<dir>/configure --prefix=/<dir>/a\ b\ c)
[I probably will not look into this.].

Ralf