Re: 15autotest-more-info-prettier.diff

[Paul Eggert]

address@hidden writes:

> This is the same problem you are having with patsubst and regex
> right? I'm not sure that I understand the criterion for determining
> whether a builtin is underquoting.  Are you saying that the argument
> collecter needs to be more careful with quotes, or that the
> internals of some builtins should add quotes before they shipout
> their results?

The latter.  For example, you need to be able to take an arbitrary
string and use those builtins to select a part of it.  Currently
you can't do it, since the resulting string isn't quoted, and is
rescanned so the quotes are lost.

Also, there needs to be a mechanism for handling arbitrary strings,
including strings with unbalanced quotes.  This is a continual problem
with Autoconf; it causes lots of problems with users.