Re: FYI: IRIX 6.5 and exporting symbols.

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hi Noah, Peter, others,

* Noah Misch wrote on Thu, Mar 24, 2005 at 04:04:51AM CET:
> On Sun, Mar 20, 2005 at 08:18:48AM +0100, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> > > Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> > > > This is not ok:  $ECHO may only take one argument, so you must
> 
> What systems have that problem?  What do they do with the latter arguments?
> 
> > > > double-quote.  Furthermore, the argument may not start with a hyphen
> > > > in general, for it might be misinterpreted as option to the $ECHO
> > > > command. The solution is to use the slower
> > > >   $ECHO "X$what $ever" | $Xsed
> > 
> > > > I see this bug is in several places here.  :-/
> 
> Do there exist `echo' commands that interpret something other than `-n', `-e',
> `-E', `--version', or `--help' as options?  If it is only specific leading
> arguments that cause trouble and not arbitrary `-STRING', we need not use 
> $Xsed
> in too many places.

Well, this is kind of Libtool-specific, as we use one of
  echo
  print -r
  printf %s\n
  $CONFIG_SHELL $0 --fallback-echo

for $ECHO, and the third one at least does the wrong thing with more
than one argument, and the first and second mind leading dashes.
Unfortunately, ksh's `print -r' complains about options it doesn't know
(tested with pdksh), unlike all echos I know:

$ print -r -lfoo
ksh: print: -l: unknown option

When going through these, I would like to replace most of the bad cases
with either
  echo ...      # when totally safe (i.e., no backslash either), or
  $ECHO ".."    # when no leading hyphen, or
  $ECHO "X.." | $Xsed   # if all else fails

The problem with the first is that if we ever decide to allow library or
object names containing a backslash, we'd need to go through the list
again..

Of course, I'd take a well-formed patch as well.  :-)

Thinking out loud: one _could_ add 'echo -e' as a candidate.  The
problem with changing the initialization code is that it is quite
fragile, and tends to break on just the platform you did not test
it on.

Regards,
Ralf