Yup, you're absolutly right that my solution relies on backslashes being used for quoting. If that changes, it would break, and thus I fully agree your conclusion about it not being an option.

Actually, I wrote this 4 lines mainly because i've found this problem funny, but the implementation i really prefer is your original one with no printf (it's the easiest to read/understand imho, and sure it's also, by far, the fastest one).

Hi TGL. Your implementation makes assumptions about the quoting method used by printf %q, for example it assumes that the result will never contain "<  >" for any possible "$@". This might be true at the moment, but it's an implementation detail of bash printf that is subject to change. I appreciate the effort to remove the loop, but IMHO both of my previous implementations are better since they avoid the assumption. Thanks!

This sequence works with no loop, but even more ugly:

# quote the args, with a marker aroung each one
foo=$(printf '< %q >' "${@}")
# reintroduce empty args if nothing in the middle of a marker
foo="${foo//<  >/< '' >}"
# tail of a marker + head of the next one => space
foo="${foo// >< / }"
# cleanup remaining half-markers on both sides of the string
foo="${foo#< }" ; foo="${foo% >}"

Aron, thanks for the update on what's going on behind the scenes with the Mozilla ebuilds. I'd like to comment on your Extensions section.

I've created several custom packages for deployment of Firefox and Thunderbird (on Windows, but in this case the process should carry over to Linux). One of the things I wanted to do was include certain extensions that I personally consider essential to the Firefox/Thunderbird experience, of which Enigmail was certainly a member.

As you mentioned, installing extensions globally and automatically is a rather difficult process. However, after much experimentation, I was able to get the -install-global-extension to work reliably. Unfortunately, due to the default behavior of Firefox/Thunderbird to create a profile directory before doing anything else, and to display the Profile Migration wizard upon initial load, this process is needlessly complicated. In order to get it working under Windows I have to install it, run it initially to set it as the default browser and create the profile directory, wait for it to launch the profile wizard, then kill the process. I can then proceed to install extensions, one at a time, using -install-global-extension.

Under Linux, the same concepts should apply. Instead of trying to build and install the extensions as you described, just download the .xpi and install with -install-global-extension. You'd have to be root, of course, but any installation through portage would be done by root anyway. If you try to install the extension before a profile directory exists for Firefox, some trickery may need to be performed, but it should still be relatively straightforward.

I really like the idea of including popular Firefox/Thunderbird extensions in portage, just as popular modules for Perl and PHP are included. I'd be happy to help you (or another maintainer) work on this if you could use the assistance. And again, thanks for the great update. :-)

emake vs make has hit me a few times, and it's always come down to a broken parallel build (MAKEOPTS).

Also I know az was working on nsplugin stuff just a day or two ago, so I hope you've talked to him.