Pursuant to Theodore Petrosky's recent trouble report, I thought I would
see what happens if you try to build Postgres in a directory whose path
contains spaces, or if the install prefix contains spaces.
It doesn't work, not even close.
It looks to me like there are a couple of hundred places in the
Makefiles that would need to be fixed by adding quotes around various
references to $(libdir) and related variables. I'm afraid that VPATH
builds with spaces in the path to the original source tree are not
realistically fixable at all; certainly prep_buildtree cannot easily be
fixed (it misparses the output of "find") and it looks like we'd need
upstream Autoconf changes as well to get configure to work fully in that
scenario.
I don't think it's appropriate to try to fix this at RC3 stage,
seeing that it's not a regression --- this never worked before either.
But maybe we should add it to the TODO list to consider working on
someday.
regards, tom lane