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by Const-me 2599 days ago
Most popular folder on Windows is "My documents", it has a space at least in some Windows versions. Make doesn't support such paths: http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?712

VBScript works better on Windows, IMO. Also works out of the box on all Windows versions since at least 2000 (on Win9x it was shipped with IE).
3 comments
pinum 2599 days ago
>Most popular folder on Windows is "My documents"

Not really... not since XP, anyway. Unless you have a space in your username (which is a terrible idea for many other reasons), your "Documents" path is C:\Users\JohnSmith\Documents. "Program Files" is pretty much the only important path which is likely to have spaces, and your makefiles (hopefully!) don't need to touch that.

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Const-me 2599 days ago
On Windows, it's not up to me to decide where users will keep my stuff, and where it will work. Users decide.

For a software to work fine on Windows, it must support spaces in files and paths. Also Unicode in files and paths.

VBScript does, GNU Make doesn't.

> which is a terrible idea for many other reasons

If you use make to setup stuff, it's very possible you'll need to access "c:\Users\All Users" which does contain space in username. Also "c:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files" which contain more than one.

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WhiteOwlLion 2599 days ago
You can try the 8.3 convention,

DOCUME~1 Documents

or

<SYMLINKD> ALLUSE~1 All Users [C:\ProgramData]

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deng 2599 days ago
> Make doesn't support such paths

That is entirely correct and really the most glaring downside of Make. In my opinion: If you have spaces in your dependency names, just stay away from Make as far as possible.

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enesunal 2598 days ago
You wouldn't install Visual Studio 6 to XP easily; since it wasn't support spaces in "Program Files" directory :)
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Const-me 2597 days ago
Long paths were introduced in Windows NT in 1993, VC6 released in 1998.

I’ve just installed Visual C++ 6.0 Professional on a WinXP VmWare machine. Took less than a minute, BTW — modern SSDs are awesome. The default installation path under program files also contain spaces, it’s "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\VC98"

BTW, they have a bug even on the very first welcome screen: http://const.me/tmp/vc6.png

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