Bad escaping of --test-options

[sjakobi]

dhall has a tasty test-suite which I would like to execute with the arguments -p /type-inference\/failure/.

The arguments that cabal ends up passing to the tasty executable are -p ''\''/type-inference\/failure/'\''':

$ cabal test dhall:tasty --test-options "-p '/type-inference\/failure/'" -v
...
Test suite tasty: RUNNING...
/home/simon/src/dhall-haskell/dist-newstyle/build/x86_64-linux/ghc-8.6.5/dhall-1.26.0/t/tasty/noopt/build/tasty/tasty -p ''\''/type-inference\/failure/'\'''
option -p: Could not parse pattern

[UnkindPartition]

Normally '' would be interpreted and stripped by the shell. It looks like cabal is not doing that (i.e. it tries to pass the single quotes verbatim to the test suite). That's not necessarily a bug, though it would be nice if the precise semantics of --test-options was documented somewhere (is it?).

In this particular case I think you can simply drop the single quotes, as the outer double quotes would prevent the shell from interpreting the \/, but if the agument contained a white space, I wouldn't know how to pass it.

[sjakobi]

In this particular case I think you can simply drop the single quotes, as the outer double quotes would prevent the shell from interpreting the \/

Yes! --test-options "-p /type-inference\/failure/" works. How had I not tried this before?!

[ulysses4ever]

I wonder if #8093 improved/resolves this.

[Mikolaj]

Or breaks. Let's add the example above as a test for #8093.