On Nov 21, 2007, at 00:29, Juan Manuel Palacios wrote:
On Nov 20, 2007, at 4:02 AM, Anders F Björklund wrote:
Juan Manuel Palacios wrote:
http://trac.macports.org/projects/macports/ticket/13145 as well (preflight stuff)
Though I'm not incredibly happy with the state of this issue, it is a matter of fact that dealing with paths containing spaces can turn into a major headache for us (and I'm not just referring to MacPorts itself here, I can't imagine the thousands of ports that we distribute that might hide this type of bugs in their configurations and/or Makefiles.... uuughhh!). I tried bootstrapping MacPorts into a path with spaces and couldn't even get through our own configuration script, let alone get to my dp2mp-move upgrading rules to try to bullet-proof them. I know the original poster's problems creeps up when I try to upgrade his personal configuration file, as it's the path to his home dir what contains spaces and not MacPorts' prefix, but it's basically the same situation.
I'm not suggesting that paths with spaces should be supported. I just wanted *volumes* with spaces in their names to be supported, while still installing in the usual /opt/local prefix locally on the volume... The original poster mentioned that a manual install works just fine, it's just the preflight script in the package that is referring to things with "/Volumes/Litter Box" prefixed to the regular paths ? I know someone else wanted to install in their home folder, while it was located on a path with spaces, but that is an issue "for later"...
OK, will definitely try to fix it for that scenario. However, my recommendation still stands: avoid paths with spaces in them if possible!
Right. I don't see why it would matter where in the path (volume name, not volume name) spaces occur; spaces anywhere in the path are not going to be acceptable to a whole lot of build scripts. I once submitted a bug against a popular package asking them to support spaces in paths, and it was closed as wontfix. MacPorts itself should be made to fail (with an intelligible message) if installed to a prefix with a space anywhere in it, to avert any such problems that users would inevitably run into later.