Re: Double slashes in config.h

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> --ansi may have other consequences, and I don't trust it.
> Can we avoid generating these double-slashes?

I have had a bit of experience with this stuff in the installation
procedure of preview-latex and AUCTeX where several generated
directory names were passed through or into Lisp and caused trouble.

File name completion of directories in shells like bash adds the slash
automatically, so it is far too optimistic to assume that users won't
enter spurious slashes when specifying directory options.

One can clean up those names manually.  This is not necessarily
trivial, given that one would also want to remove trailing backslashes
on Windows.  And the experience was that there were almost always
oversights in that area whenever stuff got updated or rearranged.

And those are more or less minor packages and Makefiles.

So I'd say that it would be far too optimistic for a large project
like Emacs to rely on no double-slashes creeping up anywhere.

Yes, it can be done, but it is not something that works easily and can
be resolved without recurring time and again by accident.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum