Re: autoconf choking on paths containing comma

[Dean Povey]

On Sat, 27 Apr 2002 11:56:54 -0400, Earnie Boyd wrote: 
>Sascha Silbe wrote:
>> 
>> Hi!
>> 
>> I first tried it on the openssh ml, but they told me it'd rather look like a
>> bug in autoconf, so here I am.
>> 
>
>The autoconf team chose to use a comma `,' character in the sed command
>because they reasoned that most persons wouldn't have path names with
>commas.

Yes, well I think Sascha can be forgiven for missing this undocumented 
`feature'.  Particularly as for a standard AC_SUBST autoconf carefully 
ensures that a , on the RHS of a sed expression is correctly quoted, and
as far as I can tell this used to work fine until the abs_xxxx substs
were introduced (presumably why this was never a problem before).


>> This is my problem:
>> 
>
>Yes it is.  Change your path names.
>

Good software shouldn't do random things on random input. The correct
answer is that autoconf should escape the commas, or it should print out a
helpful error message.

A quick glance through the code shows shows that the sed script that is
being output to config.status to subst the ac_xxxx_dirs should be using the
same hack used for the AC_SUBST stuff to ensure that @ and , on the RHS of
the sed expression are escaped.