> Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 15:17:52 -0700 (PDT) > From: Aaron Shatters <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Cc: [email protected] > > >As for the "echo." case, it's just a bizarre consequence of cmd > >command-line parsing (there are many more manifestations of that, and > >others have pointed out some of them). > > Documentation from microsoft: > > http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/echo.mspx?mfr=true > > This is not a bizarre consequence... this is a documented use case suggested > by the supplier of this shell.
You do see that there's no contradiction between what I wrote and the fact (which is known to me for a long time) that cmd behaves as designed, don't you? I didn't say that it's a coincidence, I just said that the cmd parsing _as_designed_ yields consequences that are utterly alien to any other interactive shell, in particular those for which Make's code was written. What cmd is trying to do is use characters other than whitespace as delimiters. That kind of design might make sense to someone, but teaching job.c routines to abide by it is a formidable job that I don't intend to undertake any time soon, primarily because in practice this doesn't rear its ugly head except in very rare and corner cases. Of course, if someone steps forward and writes clean code to implement that, I'd happily review it and recommend it to Paul. > >My reasoning is that supporting such weirdo parsing is a maintenance > >burden. The way Make parses the commands now cannot be easily > >modified to cater to these strange corners in cmd. > > I suppose that I am not in the position to dispute this argument. I can say > with certainty that allowing for this one case would not be a difficult > change, because I've already done it... Sorry, I don't see any real gain in fixing this one case alone; the problem you needed it for can be solved in any number of other ways that do not require changes to Make. And on top of this, your suggested change was an ad-hoc kludge that doesn't scale well to other similar consequences of the way cmd parses commands. I'm sure support for ``interesting'' cmd features like "copy a+b+c+d=xyzzy" can be put to much more useful work than "echo.", but it cannot be solved by ad-hoc tweaks of the table of built-ins. That is why a more general solution, if done cleanly, will get my support, while your suggestion does not. _______________________________________________ Make-w32 mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/make-w32
