Spaces in pathnames: forbidden, supported or not tested ?

[Eric PAIRE]

Hi,

I am currently using 'configure' generated file under MinGW. On Windows, 
Msys and MinGW have been installed in 'Program Files' (Yes, there is an 
unfortunate space in it), and most of the installed packages configure 
properly (probably by chance, because I do use tools installed in 
standard and not specified by environment variable), except for LD, 
because LD is positionned by the AC_PROG_LD macro, which calls 
AC_PROG_LD_GNU macro.

The 'gcc -print-prog-name-ld' command in AC_PROG_LD returns a complete 
Windows path which contains a space, then the execution of $LD in 
AC_PROG_LD_GNU fails, and my LD is not detected as a GNU ld, which has 
some unwanted consequences...

It seems to me that nothing prevents path names to get spaces in them, 
but the problem is that using `"$LD" -v` requires that LD does not 
contain some particular argument put with the pathname of ld. This 
solution might work if LD arguments are not added to LD, but to another 
FLAGS argument specific to LD (and probably not to LDFLAGS) that 
differentiates the progname from its arguments. I would like to get your 
comments on that, and particularly if paths with spaces in them are 
supported, or if it is not tested, or if this should be forbidden. In 
the later case, I guess that this should be clearly stated somewhere 
(and if it is, I have not been able to find it, sorry).

Thanks,
Eric