Hi David, (this is a belated reply :) On Jan 1, 2015, at 11:57 PM, <autoconf-request@xxxxxxx> <autoconf-request@xxxxxxx> wrote: >> Basically, ` ` becomes `_space_` and so on, for many more potentially tricky characters. >> The aim was to have freedom in relation to packages/filenames. It seems to work OK! (*) > > That is an interesting idea. I do worry that it too easily collides with normal names. Perhaps a double underscore before and after the key word would counter that problem. Double underscores indeed would reduce the probability of human misunderstanding; However, the transformation is unambiguous already once it is *known* if a string is in its expanded form or not, since all underscores themselves are also expressed; see: https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/blob/master/easybuild/tools/filetools.py#L87 > You still need to generate the correct values in makefiles and elsewhere. But clearly the first step is to have an unambiguous representation. Exactly, that is the point. The whole aim of that function was to permit a representation that has the best chance of success across different situations (fi. name ` Ήλεκτρον ` would be transformed sufficiently, to make it nicely usable). <debate zone> With all their great benefits, Unix shells have forced upon as a view of the world whereby arbitrary limitations of build processes are always faced as after-thoughts. May be one day we will be able to run complex builds w/out worrying on directory names... </debate zone> best, Fotis -- echo "sysadmin know better bash than english" | sed s/min/mins/ \ | sed 's/better bash/bash better/' # signal detected in a CERN forum _______________________________________________ Autoconf mailing list Autoconf@xxxxxxx https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/autoconf
