Re: TODO item: make world safe for spaces in build/install

Tom Lane wrote:

>Pursuant to Theodore Petrosky's recent trouble report, I thought I would
>see what happens if you try to build Postgres in a directory whose path
>contains spaces, or if the install prefix contains spaces.
>
>It doesn't work, not even close.
>
>It looks to me like there are a couple of hundred places in the
>Makefiles that would need to be fixed by adding quotes around various
>references to $(libdir) and related variables. I'm afraid that VPATH
>builds with spaces in the path to the original source tree are not
>realistically fixable at all; certainly prep_buildtree cannot easily be
>fixed (it misparses the output of "find") and it looks like we'd need
>upstream Autoconf changes as well to get configure to work fully in that
>scenario.
>
>I don't think it's appropriate to try to fix this at RC3 stage,
>seeing that it's not a regression --- this never worked before either.
>But maybe we should add it to the TODO list to consider working on
>someday.
>
>
>
>

I've just reluctantly managed to convince myself that it's worth a TODO.
In 99% of cases it's a matter of "don't do that". If we didn't have
relocatable installs it would matter a lot. Maybe for now it's worth
checking for and causing an error at the configure stage. That would be
nicer than some arbitrary failure later in the process.

cheers

andrew