Re: carriage return line endings vs. literal ^M in status.m4

[Ralf Wildenhues]

* Jim Meyering wrote on Sat, Apr 05, 2008 at 02:45:45PM CEST:
> Eric Blake <address@hidden> wrote:
> >
> > If CR is _not_ the EOL marker, then how would CR appear at the end of the
> > line?  Where are we doing input into $tmp/subs1.awk that could create a
> > spurious CR if the platform does not use CR?  And if CR is not EOL, then
> > do we really need to escape intermediate CR rather than treating it as a
> > literal character?
> 
> Before writing the patch, I wondered about that too, and did a little
> archaeology, but didn't find any good rationale, though I didn't look
> very hard.

As I already noted, the aim was to allow users to substitute CR
(in packages that may not have to be portable to BeOS, MinGW).

> > And according to this patch, if CR _is_ the EOL marker, then just
> > using mv works.  So why not use mv unconditionally?

Well, rather than using mv unconditionally one could then just forget
about subs1.awk completely, and create subs.awk directly.  But I would
not like to go that way, at this point.

> Assuming the existing CR-conversion code (not just for EOL markers) was
> necessary, I thought it best to minimize changes for the common EOL==NL case.

Yep, thanks.

Cheers,
Ralf