[Ecls-list] Help needed: autoconf with spaces in names

[Daniel Herring]

On Sun, 3 Oct 2010, Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll wrote:

> It seems that "configure" does not work when one of the directories contains a space in the name. Is this a known limitation?

Here's output from a recent GNU package's configure script.

# ../a\ space/libtool-2.4/configure
../a space/libtool-2.4/configure: line 2668: ../a: No such file or directory
## ----------------------- ##
## Configuring libtool 2.4 ##
## ----------------------- ##

checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/ginstall -c
checking whether build environment is sane... configure: error: unsafe srcdir value: `../a space/libtool-2.4'
# echo $?
1
# head ../a\ space/libtool-2.4/configure
#! /bin/sh
# Guess values for system-dependent variables and create Makefiles.
# Generated by GNU Autoconf 2.67 for GNU Libtool 2.4.
#
# Report bugs to <bug-libtool at gnu.org>.
#
#
# Copyright (C) 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001,
# 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 Free Software
# Foundation, Inc.



So it appears that spaces in directory names are strongly discouraged. 
An authoritative answer would have to come from the autoconf list.  Its 
possible this changed in the recently released autoconf 2.68, but I doubt 
it.

- Daniel