sed, pathnames, commas, ?(shell functions)

[Robert Anderson]

I am working with a large posix-ish software project that likes to use
commas in filenames as a convention.  Since autoconf, amongst possibly
other things, uses "," as a sed substitution delimiter, this ends up
interacting badly with the project in question.

I was not able to grok the escaping used for AC_SUBST, even though I
gave it my best 2-minute shot.  But I was able to hack up a little sh
function for generating safe sed substitutions in config.status, with
the commas properly escaped.

Then I read the autoconf manual, and saw that sh functions were not
"least common denominator" and therefore must not be used.  So I hacked
up a much uglier and harder to understand function emulation using "set"
and "eval".  Ugh.

And _then_ I browsed the mailing list and saw some discussion that maybe
it was time to start using shell functions in the year 2003.

So, on to my question:

If I submit a patch using shell functions to make the sed substitutions
in config.status "comma safe", will it be considered?

Thanks,
Bob