Re: autoconf 2.50 fixes - gcc subdirectory only

[Alexandre Oliva <aoliva at redhat dot com>]

On May 26, 2001, "Zack Weinberg" <zackw@Stanford.EDU> wrote:

> I freely admit to not really understanding M4 quote rules unless I
> spend an hour or so getting in tune with one specific example, and it
> doesn't seem to generalize.

The general rule is: for every level of macro invocation, there should
be one level of quotation.

> I have had bad luck with arguments which are not quoted *both* in
> the macro, and in the macro's caller.  Dunno if this is one of those
> places.

If the macro itself isn't properly quoted, the caller may have to
introduce additional quotes to work around the fault in the callee.
Sometimes, it's just impossible to do it.

If the callee introduces over-quotation to ease the operation of
callers, there will be cases in which it's impossible to pass certain
arguments to the callee.


In case you still haven't read the new chapter on m4 quotation rules
in autoconf 2.50, I strongly recommend having a look at it.  Quotation
clean-up was one of the major issues in autoconf 2.50, which is why so
many configure scripts that aren't properly quoted break.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva   Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat GCC Developer                  aoliva@{cygnus.com, redhat.com}
CS PhD student at IC-Unicamp        oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist    *Please* write to mailing lists, not to me