Re: make cannot handle prerequisites that contain a colon

[Paul D. Smith]

%% Andreas Buening <address@hidden> writes:

  ab> Paul D. Smith wrote:
  >> The idea I had involves changing escaped special characters like spaces
  >> into "impossible" byte values in make's internal string representation.
  >> That way all of make's current manipulation would continue to work
  >> as-is: when searching for whitespace to break up words for example it
  >> would not see the "impossible" byte values as whitespace, so it wouldn't
  >> break on that character.

  ab> If I've been told correctly, then the special about UTF-8 is that
  ab> is takes all 7 bit characters as they are, i.e., a space is still
  ab> a space. Only 8 bit character can have a special meaning.

True.  But there are some (low) 7-bit characters which are extremely
unlikely to appear in a filename, which could also be used.  I don't
know that it's a requirement to support every single legal character
that _might_ appear in a filename.

For example, things like ASCII 0x01 (and thus UTF-8 0x01), etc. are
pretty unlikely to appear in filenames that anyone would ever want to
use with make.

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