[Qt-interest] INCLUDEPATH / LIBS with blank spaces

[Thiago Macieira]

Andreas Pakulat wrote:
>On 19.05.09 16:25:59, Oliver.Knoll at comit.ch wrote:
>> Miguel Cardenas wrote on Tuesday, May 19, 2009 3:00 PM:
>> >...if I "quote" them they still are not
>> > found! What can I do?
>>
>> Remove the blanks or Rename_Your_Include_Paths_Like_This?
>
>Or use a buildsystem that doesn't have arbitrary limits. There are
> plenty out there, for example hand-written makefiles, scons, cmake,
> autotools, boost's bjam.

This is not about arbitrary limits. This is about escaping: spaces are 
delimiters, so you have to somehow tell the interpreter (and everything 
else, by the way) that the particular space in question isn't a delimiter, 
but should be treated as just another character.

This limitation isn't exclusive of qmake. You have to know how to escape 
your spaces in Makefiles too -- including the escaping necessary for the 
shell program that make is going to use. Therefore, the escaping issue 
applies to all Makefile-based systems.

CMake, for instance, uses : as separators in library lists (; on Windows). 
So, if you're not careful, you'll not be able to use library names 
containing those symbols. Also, you have to be careful about spaces on any 
argument-replacing language, because of whitespace condensing and 
trimming.

Automake is very likely to have the same problem too. Probably even worse, 
considering that automake source files are processed into Makefiles, so you 
need one more level of escaping.

Scons, however, since it's using a full programming language, is more 
likely to be immune to those errors. It doesn't need spaces as separators, 
since it can use proper lists and other data structures.

Anyways, qmake supports paths with spaces:
INCLUDEPATH += "/path/with spaces"
LIBS += -L"/path/with spaces"

It does whitespace condensing though. To have more than one space:
INCLUDEPATH += . "/tmp/foo\ \ bar"
LIBS += -L"/tmp/foo\ \ bar" -labc

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) nokia.com
  Senior Product Manager - Nokia, Qt Software
      Sandakerveien 116, NO-0402 Oslo, Norway
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