Re: sed, pathnames, commas, ?(shell functions)

[Robert Anderson]

On Wed, 2003-02-26 at 02:29, Paul Eggert wrote:
> Robert Anderson <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > If I submit a patch using shell functions to make the sed substitutions
> > in config.status "comma safe", will it be considered?
> 
> I suspect that's more likely that we'll introduce shell functions in
> new features than start right away in replacing old code with shell
> functions.  This process has already started.  At some point it will
> gather steam but it might be a bit early right now.

I'm not sure I understand the rationale behind that.  It seems to me
either autoconf depends on shell functions or it doesn't.  Requiring
developers to know which features are shell function dependent and which
aren't seems like needless complexity.

> In the meantime maybe we should use '|' instead of ','.  That would be
> a simple workaround.  In practice, '|' is far less likely to occur in
> filenames than ',' is.

That solution occurred to me also.  While the problematic substitution
in question is a pathname, there's at least one vanilla "string" on the
RHS of such a substitution, which increases the likelihood of arbitrary
characters being in use there.

But it is certainly possible not to make _any_ assumptions about what
characters appear in a sed substitution, so it seems to me the "right"
solution is not to have implicit assumptions about "forbidden"
characters at all.

Sorry to be so contrarian!  But I think a nice general solution "for all
time" exists here, and I'm willing to provide it; I just need to
understand the constraints on it.

Thanks,
Bob