MacPorts custom installation prefix and precompiled binaries

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Aug 7, 2022, at 08:05, Steven Smith wrote:

> Someday, one hopes that there will be a cleanup of all the tcl code that breaks for prefix paths with spaces and non-ascii characters, but that’s aspirational, not reality.

Many ports use build systems like autoconf that do not support paths that contain spaces or other special characters [1]. As such there's no point in spending time to fix MacPorts base or individual Portfiles to support paths that contain spaces or special characters.


[1] https://www.gnu.org/savannah-checkouts/gnu/autoconf/manual/autoconf-2.71/html_node/File-System-Conventions.html

> Autoconf uses shell-script processing extensively, so the file names that it processes should not contain characters that are special to the shell. Special characters include space, tab, newline, NUL, and the following:
> 
> " # $ & ' ( ) * ; < = > ? [ \ ` |
> 
> Also, file names should not begin with ‘~’ or ‘-’, and should contain neither ‘-’ immediately after ‘/’ nor ‘~’ immediately after ‘:’. On Posix-like platforms, directory names should not contain ‘:’, as this runs afoul of ‘:’ used as the path separator.
> 
> These restrictions apply not only to the files that you distribute, but also to the absolute file names of your source, build, and destination directories.
> 
> On some Posix-like platforms, ‘!’ and ‘^’ are special too, so they should be avoided.