Re: Output quoting (was: Re: Possible solution for special characters in makefile paths)

On 11 April 2014 11:54, Frank Heckenbach <[email protected]> wrote:
> Tim Murphy wrote:
>
\
> Again, in my suggestion, SHELL_QUOTE would just return a modified
> string, so if you insert it in places in your makefile, it would not
> output any additional list that you seem to want or anything like
> that, it would just modify the rules where you place it.
>
> Sorry, but I think what you want is something entirely different.
> Maybe it's more related to Paul's previous suggestion of some
> instrumentation API.

You can't control what people do in SHELL_QUOTE. They can do whatever
they like - they can expand any function that make has and use it for
purposes that you didn't imagine.   You might say "no no no don't do
that" but after the feature is out there your control over it is gone.
 So it's worth thinking about the other possible uses and seeing if
one can make it a little more general and fit many purposes.

Any function that is being expanded for an automatic variable can
contain any actions, right? It can call $(file) or $(eval) or any
number of odd things potentially with side effects. Hence it can be
used for more than your suggested use case and in the end that is what
will happen when people realise that it is possible.

I'm just suggesting that it would be useful if the macro knows the
name of the variable that you're asking it to quote i.e. is it a
target or a list of dependiencies?

It would also be useful to know if the macro gets called once for
every recipe or for every time it's invoked.

Regards,

Tim

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