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

On Friday 31 December 2004 20:03, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> 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.
<snip>
> >
> >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.
>

Along similar lines, when I installed RC1 on a windows box it installed it
under the "program files" directory. Now, this was fine for most cases, but
when I had to use some of the command line tools it was really crappy trying
to write explicit directories under dos. I generally chalk that up to windows
being a crappy os to work with from the command line, but I wonder if the
installer ought to be more suggestive to use something like c:\postgresql\ or
at least warn user not to install in directories with spaces.

--
Robert Treat
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL