Re: [PATCH] Add shell-quasiquote.

[taylanbayirli@gmail.com (Taylan Ulrich Bayırlı/Kammer)]

Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> writes:

> Taylan Ulrich Bayırlı/Kammer wrote:
>> Not mentioning this strongly enough in the documentation is a bug; I'll
>> fix it.
>
> Generally speaking it's better to fix a limitation than to document
> it, if fixing it is easy (as is the case here).
>
> On POSIX shells, shell-quote-argument is just as safe as
> shqq--quote-string, and on non-POSIX shells it works better. So it's a
> win, in both readability and in portability, to use
> shell-quote-argument.

Fixing it does not seem easy at all given I can't trust
shell-quote-argument.

Please tell me which shells shell-quote-argument is guaranteed to work
safely on, so I can document it for users of my library.  Apparently csh
is not one of them for instance, despite the function trying to
accommodate for non-POSIX Unix shells.  And please be realistic in the
amount of trust we can put on the complicated implementations for
non-Unix shells.  I can't judge them myself since I don't know the
syntax of those shells at all.  Does anyone here know their syntax
comprehensively, or checked the implementation against the documentation
of those shells?  Alone the documentation on MSDN (linked in the
comments of shell-quote-argument) is giving me a headache.  (Not that
POSIX sh isn't a big headache inducer, but at least I know its
single-quote semantics very well, since they're so incredibly simple.)

(Actually, those things should be documented for shell-quote-argument,
and my documentation would point there.)

Taylan