Re: improve AS_ESCAPE

[Ralf Wildenhues]

* Eric Blake wrote on Mon, Mar 02, 2009 at 06:30:59PM CET:
> Ralf Wildenhues <Ralf.Wildenhues <at> gmx.de> writes:
> > a couple of comments on this patch (thanks as always for all your work
> > on this!)
> 
> Thanks for your reviews, even if they do come in later than you would like.

Well, yeah.  I have a huge backlog; luckily not too many for Autoconf.

The parallel Autotest issue is nagging; I've been working on it on and
off, and always ran cursing after an hour or so.  Some ksh versions or
rather clones are apparently so littered with bugs in that area (and
dash looks like it never bothered with it at all), that we might want
to take the cheap exit route and enable the code for bash and zsh only.
Although that does hurt, as I think the products of Mr. Korn himself
are rather good.  Distinguishing them is neigh impossible though AFAIK.

> > > address@hidden Should we add AS_ESCAPE_SINGLE? If we do, we can optimize 
> > > in
> > > address@hidden the case of @var{string} that does not contain '.
> > 
> > What would it do?
> 
> AS_ECHO(['AS_ESCAPE_SINGLE([a'"b])'])
> => $as_echo 'a'\''"b'
> 
> that is, AS_ESCAPE_SINGLE provides the shell-escaping necessary in a '' shell 
> context, comparable to AS_ESCAPE in the "" context.  I'm not convinced it is 
> necessary, though, hence the @comment.  What do you think?  Nuke the 
> @comment, 
> or implement the macro?

I currently don't see the need for it.  But you can also just add those
two lines of example to the @comment if you prefer that to nuking.

Cheers,
Ralf