Fwd: loginfo expansions and quotes -- documentation issues

[Norman Gray]

Greetings,

[I think this is a sort of documentation bug, in that the 1.12 
documentation appears not to specify the CVS behaviour completely.  I 
already asked this question on the info-cvs list, but I suspect that 
may have been the wrong place.]

I have a puzzle about the new-style format strings in 1.12 
administration files.  Do they respect quotes?  How do I ensure that 
they expand into a single string?

The new syntax, as described in 
<https://www.cvshome.org/docs/manual/cvs-1.12.6/cvs_18.html> for 
example, notes that both flat and list format strings `will generate a 
single argument to the called script', but the documentation doesn't 
seem to make it clear how, if at all, this interacts with quotation 
marks.

Specifically, I can't work out from the documentation whether

    mail -s "Commit: %p" mail-addr

will generate a single argument to the -s option, or end up with 
'"Commit:' being given to the -s option, and the result mailed to the 
expansion of %p"  The documentation doesn't allow me to conclude that 
there's a full sh-style quote parser sitting behind here, so I'd 
additionally guess that something like

    mail -s `echo Commit: %p` mail-addr

would not work.

Now, a little experimentation (but only a little, because this is a 
production server I'm working with) shows that "Commit: %p" does in 
fact do the `correct' thing from my point of view.  *But* this is 
irrelevant -- since the documentation doesn't guarantee this, the 
developers would be entitled to change it without warning next week, 
and they may even regard this behaviour as a bug and be working 
desperately to fix this.

My _guess_ is that the parser is intended to respect single and double 
quotes (though there's no difference between them), in such a way that 
the possibly multiple expansions of %p or %{sVv} are turned back into a 
single argument if they are enclosed within quotes.  Is that correct?

The examples show that subshells and redirections are supported as 
well.  Clearly some environment variables are available, such as 
$CVSROOT -- is there a list of which ones?

Thanks for any advice,

Norman


--
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Norman Gray  :  Physics & Astronomy, Glasgow University, UK
http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/norman/  :  www.starlink.ac.uk