Re: quotearg.c's shell_quoting_style and MinGW

> Date: Sun, 06 May 2012 10:13:13 -0700
> From: Paul Eggert <[email protected]>
> CC: [email protected], [email protected]
> 
> > There was never such an implementation of popen on any non-Posix
> > platform (nor can there be, at least on Windows, because of the need
> > to support native file names with backslashes).
> 
> The idea here is not to reimplement popen from scratch in gnulib,
> or to have gnulib popen support every feature that POSIX requires.
> The idea is only to have a popen wrapper that works assuming that
> its argument is quoted for the POSIX shell, using quotearg.
> Such arguments have a simple format that can easily be converted
> to mingw shell format.  Once this simple conversion is done, the
> wrapper call the real mingw popen.

You will break gobs of programs that use gnulib, if you implement
this.