Date: Sun, 23 Feb 1997 11:48:32 +0200 (IST)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
To: Daisuke Aoyama <jack AT st DOT rim DOT or DOT jp>
cc: DJGPP ANNOUNCE <djgpp-announce AT delorie DOT com>
Subject: Re: bashb7.zip is now available.
In-Reply-To: <199702182317.IAA20439@mail.st.rim.or.jp>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.970223114709.1447A-100000@is>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII


>   o added PATH_EXPAND variable for expanding paths when external command
> invoked.

OK, I tested this (with a few GNU configure scripts) on a machine with
more than one disk drive.  It works OK, thanks.  But I have problems
with the feature that expands pathnames inside double quotes:

	SYSROOT=c:
	PATH_SEPARATOR=:
	PATH_EXPAND=y

	"/foobar" -> "c:/foobar"

To understand why this might be a problem, imagine the following sed
command:

   sed -e "/POTFILES =/r po/POTFILES" po/Makefile.in > po/Makefile

(this is actually a line from many GNU configure scripts; it causes
the file `po/POTFILES' to be read by sed when it sees a line which has
the string "POTFILES =" in it).  With the above settings, sed gets a
command line it cannot grok:

   sed -e "c:/POTFILES =/r po/POTFILES" po/Makefile.in > po/Makefile

Of course, I could either (1) change double quotes to single quotes,
or (2) not set SYSROOT at all, to work around this.  But I don't see
why we need at all to expand pathnames inside double quotes?  If there
are certain programs that do need this, maybe we should have an
environment variable which lists such programs?