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@kimburgess kimburgess commented Jan 19, 2026

Added note about implicit backslash character replacement within all custom_target command arguments.

# This should not be necessary but removing it breaks
# building GStreamer on Windows. The underlying issue
# is problems with quoting backslashes on Windows
# which is the seventh circle of hell. The downside is
# that this breaks custom targets whose command lines
# have backslashes. If you try to fix this be sure to
# check that it does not break GST.
#
# The bug causes file paths such as c:\foo to get escaped
# into c:\\foo.
#
# Unfortunately we have not been able to come up with an
# isolated test case for this so unless you manage to come up
# with one, the only way is to test the building with Gst's
# setup. Note this in your MR or ping us and we will get it
# fixed.
#
# https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/pull/737
cmd = [i.replace('\\', '/') if isinstance(i, str) else i for i in cmd]

This behaviour leads to some extremely confusing and hard to debug build issues. The root issue (#1564) appears to be long running and has some contention around previous attempts to resolve. While this remains active it seems sensible to make side effects of the current workaround clear.

Added note about implicit backslash character replacement within all `custom_target` command arguments.
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