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

[Pascal J. Bourguignon]

Daniel Herring <dherring at tentpost.com>
writes:

> 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.

In any case, it would be quite interesting to test all the scripts and
programs in a unix installation to have some statistics on how they deal
with spaces in paths.

But if autoconf still tries to avoid them, my bet is that quite a
proportion of essential tools still don't deal with them nicely.

-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                     http://www.informatimago.com/