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.
