Re: Whitespace in `${srcdir}' during `configure'

[Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org>]

Alexander Shukaev wrote:

> It is relevant. Yesterday I've tried to build it in a directory
> "C:\Users\Haroogan\Projects\Bitbucket\Emacs for Windows", where name
> corresponds to the name of the project on Bitbucket. Yes, this case occurs
> not too often, but directories with spaces are generally allowed and
> therefore should be supported. It's an element of build robustness after
> all.

Just to be clear: building Emacs in a directory with spaces works fine.
(Tested with 24.4 tarfile just now on GNU/Linux.
There could be some MS Windows specific issue I don't know about.)

What doesn't work is passing an explicit srcdir containing spaces to
configure. This is something that configure itself rejects.
This would be an (odd) out-of-tree build.
IMO this is of very minor interest.

> My patch at least prevents:
>
> configure: line 3557: ...: No such file or directory
>
> And leads to the official error:
>
>    checking whether build environment is sane... configure: error:
>    unsafe srcdir value: ...

But line 3557, which in Emacs 24.4 is

  . $srcdir/nt/mingw-cfg.site

comes _after_ the check for an unsafe srcdir, so how is this sequence possible?

But yes, we could certainly quote that one srcdir if it somehow gets
accessed before the spaces check.

(I see that most of your patch is entirely stylistic, changing $var for
${var}.)

> and this limitation might be gone someday.

I think we should wait till that day arrives in autotools and make,
before worrying about it in Emacs.