Re: quotearg.c's shell_quoting_style and MinGW

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sun, 06 May 2012 09:41:50 -0700
> From: Paul Eggert <address@hidden>
> CC: address@hidden, address@hidden
> 
> On 05/06/2012 09:26 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > a MinGW program running on Windows does not
> > need to cater to Posix shells
> 
> It's not a question of catering to Posix shells, it's
> a question of what the output from 'diff' looks like.
> It's better to have 'diff' output be consistent on
> all platforms.

But since 'diff' output can be fed to a shell or to another program,
it should be quoted for those other programs to be able to process it
correctly.  I don't see how can these two contradicting requirements
be reconciled.

> > popen and friends don't know enough about
> > the context to DTRT with quoting.
> 
> On mingw the popen implementation can assume that popen's
> argument is quoted suitably for POSIX, since that's the popen API.

There was never such an implementation of popen on any non-Posix
platform (nor can there be, at least on Windows, because of the need
to support native file names with backslashes).  So such a requirement
is a pipe dream.