Paul D. Smith wrote:
%% "John W. Eaton" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
jwe> On 28-Jul-2006, Paul D. Smith wrote:
| Regardless, I still wonder whether my idea of building make for a POSIX
| environment with Cygwin, but setting HAVE_DOS_PATHS explicitly, would
| work.
jwe> If this could cause some valid Makefiles to do the wrong thing as
jwe> cgf suggests might happen,
Hm. I don't think I saw that message?
Certainly there are obscure cases where enabling DOS path support will
behave differently, but they're pretty rare I believe. Is this a Cygwin
thing?
This was a thing where POSIX compatible makefiles were not behaving as
expected, which is now believed to be due to the cygwin dos-path
handling patches.
jwe> then can we at least make the behavior optional, perhaps with a
jwe> command line option or magic target (maybe
jwe> ".WINDOWS_FILENAMES:")?
This would be very tricky: right now all the code to do DOS vs. POSIX
pathnames is controlled through #ifdefs, so it's a compile-time thing.
Changing it to a runtime thing would be a lot of work, I think... the
#ifdeffing in GNU make is kind of a mess, with all the different ports
we support.
Honestly, I don't see a lot of benefit to it. On a Windows system, even
in Cygwin, I would assume that everyone would always expect anything
that looked like a Windows pathname to be treated like a Windows
pathname. We're not talking about enabling this support on UNIX, just
in Cygwin.
Well, the whole point of cygwin is to give a POSIX-compatible
environment in win32. So it's aiming to be like linux, not windows.
This means that if something like a makefile parses fine in linux, but
not in cygwin (barring linker stuff), something is wrong.
And so on from there..
So even if the DOS #ifdef was enabled, we'd be back at the point of
having patches to attempt to fix this behaviour.
Unless there was some way of having two versions of make - one with this
behaviour and one without, controlled by /etc/alternatives perhaps?
Speculation on my part anyway.
Chris / EqUaTe
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