Re: [PATCH 0/10] Whitespace robustness patch series

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Benoit,

* Benoit Sigoure wrote on Sun, Dec 16, 2007 at 02:19:36PM CET:
> On Dec 4, 2007, at 10:39 PM, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
>>
>> - There is too much dwimmery going on in perl.  I think it needs more
>> than one quoting function; one for xsystem, and one for stuff like
>>     ... = new Autom4te::XFile "> $file"
>>
>> but I wouldn't know how to make it foolproof.  First, if the space is
>> missing after `>' and $file begins with `>', then append mode is used.
>> But also, if $file begins with whitespace, that is just ignored anyway.
>> Not sure whether we want to protect the user from all such kinds of
>> things.
>
> I *guess* that Autom4te::XFile will then use either the builtin `open' or 
> `IO::File'.  Both of them can be called with the mode specified in a 
> separate argument, which is safer:
>   new IO::File "file", "r";
>   open FILEHANDLE,MODE,EXPR
>
> This solves the problem nicely and safely.

Well, if you're going to propose a patch that fixes this safely, and
test it for Autoconf and Automake, and it doesn't require a newer Perl
version for either of them, then it would be a welcome addition over my
rather hackish approach at this, which consisted of adding and using
quoting functions.

Cheers,
Ralf