Subject: Re: bug#21910: libtool should check that directory names do not contain spaces

From: Bob Friesenhahn <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2015 20:09:28 -0600 (CST)

On Mon, 16 Nov 2015, Earnie wrote:

> On 11/13/2015 11:09 AM, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
>> libtool doesn't support directory names with spaces, and this will
>> not be fixed (at least in the near future). In order to avoid obscure
>> error messages (because internally, such paths get split and so on),
>> libtool should generate code to make sure that such directory names
>> are detected as soon as possible and to output a clear error message.
>>
>
> Why not support all characters allowed in the file system?  Any ASCII
> character or now-a-days UNICODE file names are supported in the OS.  Yes
> the user needs to be careful with executing a script with white space
> and special characters in the file name but not allowing it at all is a
> bit fallacious.

The problem is that libtool is a portable shell script and arguments 
need to be passed to the utilities it executes, with all that that 
entails (e.g. argument splitting and handling of special quote 
characters).  If libtool was a binary, then this problem would be 
gone.

A future issue is that libtool is configured via an autoconf configure 
script which may be a 1MB portable shell script, which also needs to 
survive the torture-test.

Somehow this still usually manages to run under MSYS. :-)

Bob
-- 
Bob Friesenhahn
[email-masked], http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/