Re: directory names with blanks break automake builds

[Peter Simons]

Ralf Wildenhues writes:

 >> I don't know what limitation you refer to. Can you please explain how
 >> make's design causes these problems?
 >
 > Well, at least white space in targets and dependencies is forbidden
 > with make.

Whitespace can be quoted with '\'. At least in GNU Make, the following
snippet works just fine:

 | output\ file : input\ file
 |      cp "$<" "$@"
 |
 | input\ file:
 |      date >"$@"

There probably are some make implementations that will not understand
the escape syntax, but personally I'd refer to that as a bug, not as a
design problem. Anyhow, Automake aims to work with all make
implementations, so it must accommodate broken makes somehow. It's an
unpleasant situation.


 > Offhand I'm not sure whether the issue you're hitting matches this,
 > so can you please state which Autoconf version you're using (and if
 > not 2.62, then retry with that), if you have lots of time on your
 > hands can you try using git Autoconf, and otherwise please show how
 > you invoke configure and how it fails?

The problem I'm hitting is that ${srcdir} contains a blank, so the path
to 'install-sh' contains a blank too:

  /tmp/test automake/ioxx-0.1$ make -s install
  Making install in include
   /bin/sh /tmp/test automake/ioxx-0.1/build-aux/install-sh -c -m 644 
'ioxx.hpp' '/tmp/foobar/include/ioxx.hpp'
  /bin/sh: /tmp/test: No such file or directory
   /bin/sh /tmp/test automake/ioxx-0.1/build-aux/install-sh -c -m 644 
'ioxx/acceptor.hpp' '/tmp/foobar/include/ioxx/acceptor.hpp'
  /bin/sh: /tmp/test: No such file or directory
  [...]

The versions I use are:

  autoconf (GNU Autoconf) 2.61
  automake (GNU automake) 1.10.1

I might get around to trying the latest versions, but unfortunately I
cannot promise anything.

Take care,
Peter