Re: FYI: escape shell meta-chars in tag variable comments [libtool--release--2.0--patch-10]

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Thu, 7 Oct 2004, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:

> [ Did you send private on purpose? ]

Not particularly.  Mostly it was sent privately since it didn't seem 
to have much value to the group, however, perhaps I was wrong.

> * Bob Friesenhahn wrote on Thu, Oct 07, 2004 at 04:44:11PM CEST:
> > > part.  Do we have to do it like this?  Did released versions of Libtool
> > > also create lines like this (i.e., do we have to support it anyway)?
> >
> > The content of .la files has varied over the years and also varies
> > from system to system.  It seems like you will need to collect a few
> > thousand existing .la files from many different systems so the code
> > can be fully tested before it is deployed.
>
> I would like to fix the possible syntax, not its semantics (most of
> that is unnecessary for ltdl anyway).

I don't see how the syntax of existing .la files can be fixed.  It may 
take several years before the world is using libtool 2.0 or later.

> For example, can we disallow mixed quoting a la
>  foo_command="bar"'baz'
> rather can we find a set of allowed variables at all.
>
> I don't think the syntax varies very much by system (it should not!),
> rather by libtool version.  That's one thing I'd like to find out more
> about.

What I mean by the syntax varying by system, it does vary since 
libtool contains oodles of rules which are selected based on ouput of 
config.guess and various tests.  I am not sure how many permutations 
there are, but there seem to be quite a lot.  We can only test on a 
small subset of available systems.  Placing new limits on command 
syntax would mean that presumed working script fragments (many which 
were contributed by libtool users) in libtool would need to be 
re-evaluated and corrected, which may result in unexpected failure on 
systems we can't reasonably test on.

In summary, what I am saying is that applying the new rules would be 
difficult to implement in practice and would take substantial time.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden
http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen