Re: HEAD: minor m4 quoting issue

[Noah Misch]

On Thu, Aug 25, 2005 at 03:01:29PM +0200, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
>         * libltdl/m4/libtool.m4 (_LT_SYS_DYNAMIC_LINKER)
>         (_LT_LINKER_SHLIBS): Double-quote unsafe tag variable
>         descriptions: they are literals.

This is reasonable.  The central problem is _LT_LIBTOOL_DECLARE expanding
variable descriptions in m4_quote.  Since you must eventually let a string
function consider the expanded text, this may be impossible to fix[1].

Practically every use of m4_quote is a data-dependent bug waiting to happen.  It
squashes whitespace around commas, and unmatched parentheses yield M4 parse
errors.  That said, changing `m4_quote($1)' to `[$1]' where both work for most
inputs only changes the classes of data that produce misbehavior.

[1] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/autoconf/2004-12/msg00094.html