RE: win32 paths with spaces

[jgrant]

Hi Paul

>   j> If the quotes remained in the string (instead of being 
> removed when
>   j> parsed as it seems at present)
> 
> Make will never remove any quotes from any variable value.
> 
> Make knows about exactly _TWO_ special characters: "$", and 
> "\" but only when appearing as the last character on the 
> line.  That's it.  Every other character is left alone and 
> means nothing to make.
> 
> 
> If someone can come up with a comprehensive suggestion, that 
> considers issues like backward compatibility, how variable 
> values will be expanded, how functions like wildcard, word, 
> foreach, call, eval, etc. will work, cross-platform 
> compatibility, shell invocation, etc. then I'm quite willing 
> to listen.  But, I've spent at least a few minutes 
> considering these issues already and I don't see any 
> realistic way to solve this with quoting.


Perhaps if an extra argument was, e.g. "make --quoted-paths" this could
change from the standard functionality and support paths with quotes and
spaces as a single item" ?  Would gnu make maintainers support this?

If you think this is unsuitable; which way of approaching the problem of
supporting paths with spaces do you think would be more appropriate?

Kind regards

Jonathan