> Date: Sun, 06 May 2012 09:41:50 -0700 > From: Paul Eggert <[email protected]> > CC: [email protected], [email protected] > > On 05/06/2012 09:26 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote: > > a MinGW program running on Windows does not > > need to cater to Posix shells > > It's not a question of catering to Posix shells, it's > a question of what the output from 'diff' looks like. > It's better to have 'diff' output be consistent on > all platforms.
But since 'diff' output can be fed to a shell or to another program, it should be quoted for those other programs to be able to process it correctly. I don't see how can these two contradicting requirements be reconciled. > > popen and friends don't know enough about > > the context to DTRT with quoting. > > On mingw the popen implementation can assume that popen's > argument is quoted suitably for POSIX, since that's the popen API. There was never such an implementation of popen on any non-Posix platform (nor can there be, at least on Windows, because of the need to support native file names with backslashes). So such a requirement is a pipe dream.
