Re: [Mingw-users] Why is MinGW escaping the command line arguments?

[Keith M. <kei...@to...>]

Greg Chicares wrote, quoting me:
[by default, we link globbing code into binaries]
>>
>> Maybe the philosophy of that default behaviour in MinGW runtime is
>> something that we should review.  Or maybe we just need more visible
>> documentation of the difference in philosophy, and how to achieve
>> the alternative behaviour.  Any comments?
>
> I believe it's already optimal. And even if it weren't, I'd hesitate
> to change a long-established behavior that some people may have come
> to rely upon.

FWIW, I fully agree.  However, I do believe that there is an issue here,
which we should address: the *default* MinGW behaviour is different from
that of MSC, as I used it on MS-DOS, and I suspect that it's similarly
different from MSVC today.  Yes, we can argue that MinGW's is the saner
behaviour, and therefore we shouldn't change it.  I share that point of
view, but I do believe we should more visibly document that it *is*
different from other popular compilers, and explain how to control it.

> Based on the session below, [...snipped...], I'd conclude that
> MinGW-built binaries behave the same way, in this respect, as the msw
> ATTRIB.EXE utility.

Yes, but only because the developers of ATTRIB.EXE deliberately coded
it to do the globbing in that manner; a standard MSC application builds
an argv by splitting the command line at unquoted white space, but it
does *not* resolve wild card file system references automatically,
unless *explicitly* linked with the setargv.obj module.

> To me, that's the least-astonishing behavior, and I think that's
> more important than imitating a more-astonishing behavior of some
> other native msw compiler.

Agreed; I would hate for it to change.  Playing devil's advocate to
some extent, however: because it is different from that other popular
compiler on the Woe32 platform, it needs more visible documentation of
the difference, than just an example in the source tarball.  Remember
that we distribute precompiled binaries, and many users, (probably
the majority), will never look at the source.

Regards,
Keith.