Bug 174319 – make.defaults specification should be extended

• Product: Gentoo Hosted Projects
• Status: RESOLVED FIXED

[Description Marien Zwart (RETIRED) 2007-04-12 18:40:06 UTC]

At least the valid characters for variable names should be
documented (to prevent ambiguity for things like "foo=bar",
"spork=$foo01": is spork now bar01 or can a previous make.defaults
have set a variable called "foo01"?). I also believe the quoting/escaping rules are incomplete (what do 'foo="bar"', 'foo=bar' and 'foo=\"bar\"' set foo to? What does 'foo=bar\\' do?) although I'm not sure what the rules for those actually *are*. If nobody else knows either tell me and I'll try to find out :)

[Comment 1 Ciaran McCreesh 2007-04-12 18:59:14 UTC]

r157. Rather than going into nasty detail about quoting rules, we just enforce that everything be double quoted.

[Comment 2 Marien Zwart (RETIRED) 2007-04-12 19:32:44 UTC]

The current text makes it impossible to escape a '$' or '"', which might break something in the future and breaks default-darwin/make.defaults now. The tree also does not have all values quoted. Should unquoted values be allowed or should the tree be fixed?

[Comment 3 Ciaran McCreesh 2007-04-12 19:38:21 UTC]

I'd be inclined to ask for tree changes just to avoid having to specify silly things like:

  foo=bar baz
  moo=oink cow=sheep
  what="does""this" "do"?

Backslash followed by a double quote or a dollar only is also doable without introducing silliness...

[Comment 4 Ulrich Müller 2018-08-09 06:47:31 UTC]

Per comment #1, the main issue is fixed. Anything beyond that (like supporting \$ or \") would be an incompatible change that cannot be done retroactively.

Closing.

[Comment 5 Ulrich Müller 2018-08-09 06:51:13 UTC]

For reference, r157 is this commit: https://gitweb.gentoo.org/proj/pms.git/commit/?id=bd0144c9ff665801697ca0d48885bc14115b3132