Hi David, (this is a belated reply :)
On Jan 1, 2015, at 11:57 PM, <autoconf-requ...@gnu.org> <autoconf-requ...@gnu.org> wrote: >> Basically, ` ` becomes `_space_` and so on, for many more potentially tricky >> characters. >> The aim was to have freedom in relation to packages/filenames. It seems to >> work OK! (*) > > That is an interesting idea. I do worry that it too easily collides with > normal names. Perhaps a double underscore before and after the key word would > counter that problem. Double underscores indeed would reduce the probability of human misunderstanding; However, the transformation is unambiguous already once it is *known* if a string is in its expanded form or not, since all underscores themselves are also expressed; see: https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/blob/master/easybuild/tools/filetools.py#L87 > You still need to generate the correct values in makefiles and elsewhere. But > clearly the first step is to have an unambiguous representation. Exactly, that is the point. The whole aim of that function was to permit a representation that has the best chance of success across different situations (fi. name ` Ήλεκτρον ` would be transformed sufficiently, to make it nicely usable). <debate zone> With all their great benefits, Unix shells have forced upon as a view of the world whereby arbitrary limitations of build processes are always faced as after-thoughts. May be one day we will be able to run complex builds w/out worrying on directory names... </debate zone> best, Fotis -- echo "sysadmin know better bash than english" | sed s/min/mins/ \ | sed 's/better bash/bash better/' # signal detected in a CERN forum _______________________________________________ Autoconf mailing list Autoconf@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/autoconf
