[Chicken-users] -D arguments vs. chicken-defaults.h

[Brandon J. Van Every]

I believe the ./configure build is driven entirely by -D arguments for 
INSTALL_HOME etc.  chicken-defaults.h is generated late in the build, is 
used by very few files, and I believe is always overridden by -D 
arguments anyways.  This leads me to believe that the form of pathnames 
in chicken-defaults.h is not to be trusted.  This form, incidentally, is:

#ifndef C_INSTALL_HOME
# define C_INSTALL_HOME "/cygdrive/c/Program Files/cygchicken/share/chicken"
#endif

I think, possibly, the quotes should be escaped.  But I am not sure.

I do not believe there should be 2 ways of passing around pathnames.  
One size should fit all, to prevent this kind of devious second 
guessing.  In the CMake build, I've broken chicken-defaults.h into 
chicken-paths.h and stack-size.h.  This is because they're determined at 
different stages of the build.  pathnames are easy to determine at 
configuration time and do not change.  The stack size may depend on the 
result of nursery sampling, and if so can only be determined at build 
time, after a lot of other stuff has been built.

In the ./configure build, -D flags are passed in different ways.  
libtool receives single quotes around a double quoted string:
-DC_INSTALL_HOME='"/e/Program Files/msyschicken/share/chicken"'

gcc receives the entire -D flag double quoted, and the double quotes for 
the pathname itself are escaped:
"-DC_INSTALL_HOME=\"/e/Program Files/msyschicken/share/chicken\""

This lends credence to the "quotes should be escaped" theory.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every