Re: Emacs vista build failures

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: David Kastrup <address@hidden>
> Cc: Johannes Weiner <address@hidden>,  address@hidden
> Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2008 01:11:26 +0200
> 
> There is no reliable way to quote stuff you want to pass into a "system"
> call.

Of course, there is.  Assuming you know what shell will interpret the
arguments, that is.

> In fact, it is not even guaranteed that calling "exec" will not
> mesh up arguments or add or remove quoting.

`exec' is not a Windows system call.  Squeezing one OS into emulation
of another should be expected to be problematic.

> There are consequences: for example, call-process and its ilk don't work
> reliably.  You can't expect the arguments given to them to actually make
> it unmolested to the argc/argv of the called program's "main".

Only because the surrounding code expects a Posix-compliant set of
functions and syscalls.  It was not written with portability in mind
from the ground up.