[RFC] dist: better support for wildcards in EXTRA_DIST

[Stefano Lattarini]

Some shells, like NetBSD 5.1 /bin/ksh, have a bug that causes
wildcards resulting from an unquoted parameter expansion not to
be expanded as expected:

  $ touch a b c d
  $ /bin/sh -c 'var="[ab]" && echo $var' # As expected.
  a b
  $ /bin/ksh -c 'var="[ab]" && echo $var' # Oops.
  [ab]

This was causing a failure in the 'extra11.test' test on NetBSD.

* lib/distdir.am: Work around this ksh bug.
---

This patch fixes the described problem, but then, ouch :-(, it breaks
the 'dollar.test' test case, which checks that automake supports files
with `$' characters in their names (Java people need this).  Any idea
on what we should do?

Stefano

 lib/am/distdir.am |   16 ++++++++++++----
 1 files changed, 12 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)

diff --git a/lib/am/distdir.am b/lib/am/distdir.am
index 8a64e5a..56570ab 100644
--- a/lib/am/distdir.am
+++ b/lib/am/distdir.am
@@ -169,10 +169,18 @@ endif %?TOPDIR_P%
 ## Also rewrite $(top_srcdir) (which sometimes appears in DISTFILES, and can
 ## be absolute) by $(top_builddir) (which is always relative).  $(srcdir) will
 ## be prepended later.
-       list='$(DISTFILES)'; \
-         dist_files=`for file in $$list; do echo $$file; done | \
-         sed -e "s|^$$srcdirstrip/||;t" \
-             -e "s|^$$topsrcdirstrip/|$(top_builddir)/|;t"`; \
+##
+       dist_files=`\
+## Use this instead of the usual idiom:
+##   list='$(DISTFILES)'; for file in $$list; do ...
+## to better support wildcards in EXTRA_DIST (for make implementations
+## that accepts them, as e.g., GNU make).  This is required for shells,
+## like /bin/ksh on NetBSD 5.1, that erroneously don't expand wildcards
+## resulting from an unquoted parameter expansion.
+         for file in ' ' $(DISTFILES); do echo $$file; done \
+           | sed -e '/^ *$$/d' \
+                 -e "s|^$$srcdirstrip/||;t" \
+                 -e "s|^$$topsrcdirstrip/|$(top_builddir)/|;t"`; \
 ## (The second `t' command clears the flag for the next round.)
 ##
 ## Make the subdirectories for the files.
-- 
1.7.7.3