Re: more m4 underquotations

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Bruce,

* Bruce Korb wrote on Tue, Feb 13, 2007 at 10:50:56PM CET:
> Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> > -            alpha* | i[34567]86 | m68k | s390*)
> > +            alpha* | i[[34567]]86 | m68k | s390*)

> I figure that if it is this difficult to get it right, then
> it is too difficult and it is wrong.  Sometimes, though, I
> feel like you disregard my usability warnings.....

Actually, I don't know when I should have disregarded your warnings.
I know a few times when you warned, but I did not know of a better
way, and apparently nobody else did either.

And frankly, I don't know a good way to make things easier here.
changequote IMHO isn't one: as soon as you *know* where you would
have needed it, you can also just use another quoting style.

And yes, I tend to look into the resulting configure script when writing
macros, and I routinely grep for likely error strings, but I simply do
not know of a good mechanical way to prevent these kinds of quoting bugs
that has no false positives.  But I did find these errors with a
   grep '[^[]\[[0-9]' m4/*.m4

and sorting out the output.

Cheers,
Ralf