Description Chris Recoskie 2009-06-09 10:54:57 EDT

Right now there are numerous issues surrounding various combinations of special characters, whether appearing in file names, or in build macros, or in build option values.  Passing some characters to make for example, will cause the makefile to blow up.  Other characters have special meaning to the operating system shell, and may require escaping.

There are also issues surrounding path formatting.  Windows in particular can be problematic, as some builders like windows paths (MinGW), and others do not (CygWin).  Then there is also the problem of doing remote builds, which can end up targeting anything.

We need a system whereby we can fully specify the targeted build environment, including:

- path formatting
- special characters that require escaping for the builder
- special characters that require escaping for the shell
- what characters your command should use for I/O redirection (often you need to merge stdout and stderr to prevent improper interleaving)
- allowable length of commands (right now if your project is big enough, the link step will blow up because the command is too long)
- anything else?

I suggest that there be an element in the buildDefinitions extension point that facilitates the definition of the "target environment" (for lack of a better term), which would encompass the items above and anything else we can think of that needs to be there.