On 7/26/2019 1:11 PM, Soegtrop, Michael wrote: > Dear Cygwin Team and Users, > > In May I modified Emacs for Cygwin so that it can truly handle Windows paths. > I do a lot of MinGW cross compilation on Windows and want to seamlessly use > tools like debuggers compiled for MinGW in Cygwin Emacs, so I need this. I > also tried the Windows Emacs distrubution, but it didn't find it very > convincing, because it comes with yet another Posix layer for Windows, and a > rather heavy one. Cygwin Emacs is a substantially more elegant solution. One > can find some emacs lisp packages to help with this, but they all rely on > path translation, so an open works but the path Emacs uses internally is the > Cygwin path then. This is in many cases not good enough. I found that I have > to modify the core C file handling file (src/fileio.c) to make it really work. > > I wanted to ask if there is general interest in this. If so I would like to > publish this work. But to do so I would need some advice on how to do this. > The path handling code of Emacs is localized (src/fileio.c) but quite obscure > and I would even call it messy so it requires quite a few changes and it is > hard to tell if my changes to support Posix and Windows paths in one build > don't break compatibility with some ancient operating systems. For this > reason it might be hard to get these changes into Emacs upstream, so that > this would just be a compile time option. > > The alternatives would be to have a separate package in Cygwin which applies > a patch to emacs, say an emacs-winpath package I could maintain. Of cause I > would try to get it upstream to reduce maintenance effort, but as I said, it > might get tricky because I don't have access to a computer museum to test > Emacs on all platforms it supports.
I made a brief attempt to do something like this a few years ago in response to a user request, and I found that every time I touched one part of the code, it broke another part of the code. [My vague recollection is that I lost interest when completion stopped working.] If you think you have something that works, I'd be interested in seeing it and testing it. The discussion should probably continue on the cygwin-apps list, which is the place to discuss Cygwin packaging. Ken (Cygwin's Emacs maintainer)
