Re: Apostrophe in path

[Brendan McKay]

Yes, the same occurs with autoconf 2.69 (tested on MacOSX 10.9.2).

While I entirely agree with your sentiments about use of characters
like apostrophes in folder names, I met this as the developer/distributor
of the (free) software.  The problem was encountered by one of my
users, who was trying to configure my software under Cygwin.  Users
of Windows, and the part of the Mac community without Unix
background, are quite likely to use folder names like this and the
frequency will not get less over time.

As a software developer I can't really tell people to change the
names of their home directories.  Autoconf should still work,
at least in the more common cases. In the case of my software,
whose configure-make sequence is very simple, properly
escaping this one line in config.status fixes the problem since
it is the only place where the full path appears.

Cheers, Brendan.


On 13/05/2014 10:23 pm, Eric Blake wrote:
> On 05/13/2014 01:08 AM, Brendan McKay wrote:
> > Apologies if this is a known bug.
> >
> > Autoconf 2.65:  If the path to the current directory has a component with
> > an apostrophe in it, an erroneous line is written to config.status.
> Can you reproduce this with autoconf 2.69?
>
> In general, having an unpaired ' in the current working directory is a
> recipe for disaster; even if autoconf-generated scripts handle it
> gracefully, you WILL have problems with automake, make, and probably
> other tools.  And even if all the stock toolchains are taught to
> generate sane code for a fully-quoted configure.ac, many packages have a
> configure.ac that is not fully-quoted.  It's one of those situations
> where you are better off picking a smarter name for your current working
> directory, rather than trying to patch hundreds of packages to work
> around your odd corner case.