Re: directory names with blanks break automake builds

[Bob Proulx]

Peter Simons wrote:
> I just ran across an interesting problem with automake 1.10. Just unpack
> any other build into a directory called, say "/tmp/test automake", and
> run it. In my particular case, the makefiles failed to call the local
> copy of install-sh because of the blank. I checked my configure.ac
> script and Makefile.am, but it does seem like there is anything I, as a
> user, could do about that -- this really seems to be a problem in the
> generated code. Has anyone else noticed this phenomenon?

This is a documented limitation.  See the following reference.

  
http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/html_node/limitations-on-file-names.html#limitations-on-file-names

Using whitespace in filenames has long been an issue for Unix tools in
general because whitespace is used as an input field separator.
Therefore in the culture, filenames with whitespace are strongly
discouraged.  It just isn't a natural thing to do on a traditionally
command line based environment.  This leads to 'make' not being
designed to handle filenames with whitespace and of course automake
tries to produce portable make configurations.

Bob