Re: multiline output variables.

[Dan Manthey]

On Mon, 17 Jan 2005, Stepan Kasal wrote:

> Hello,
>
> You decided to use 2), which is the most correct solution.  Unfortunately,
> the performance penalty may be high.  I'm afraid it's to high to be worth it.

Yeah, that's what I was afraid of.

>
> I think that if we choose a sufficiently unusual delimiter, we can go with
> it.  I suggest that we use the delimiter "@!_!#_ \n" (the last two characters
> are space and newline).

Sounds like a good solution.  Note that the post processing can transform
the delimiter pretty arbitrarily, so there's no need for it to be the same
at both ends.  This may allow a choice of two things that're even less
likely.

> - use  grep -c 'DELIM$'  to check that the file contains the right number
> of delimiters.  If this check fails, issue an error message explaining that
> the repacement text cannot contain "DELIM\n".

This is an excellent idea.

> I think this solution is general enough for practical purposes, yet it
> presents no slowdown of configure run.
>
> Dan, would you volunteer to rewrite your patch along this suggestion?
>

Yes, I'll clean up my code as per other suggestions, document it, and
implement the above, hopefully in the next day or two.

-Dan