Mail Archives: cygwin/2007/04/18/11:57:41
Eric Blake wrote:
> Interesting thought. But it is more than just cygwin 1.7.0 that would have to
> be changed; we would also need a new release of gcc that no longer added an
> automatic .exe to files as they are compiled. And there might be some severe
> repurcussions in automake/autoconf where they currently are coded to handle
> $(EXEEXT) all over the place, if they do it based on hostname rather than on
> what the default gcc output is. I would have to remove some of the .exe magic
> I've added in coreutils (but it would mean I'm closer to an upstream image).
Um, some people actually launch cygwin tools from outside a shell, via
shortcuts. Like, say, rxvt, or run, or bash. I think the windows
subsystem still requires known extensions in order to start new
processes (%PATHEXT%=.COM;.EXE;.BAT;.CMD;.VBS;.VBE;.JS;.JSE;.WSF;.WSH)
And even if that were not a problem, I still suspect that making a
drastic change like that will have many far-reaching, non-obvious, and
deleterious effects. Here's one of the top of my head (and not nearly
the most significant): right now cygwin and mingw benefit from each
other; there is a lot of cross-pollination in the ports of various
packages to "windows" that we get to leverage. Making a change like
this would IMO have a net negative effect on this kind of resource
multiplication we currently benefit from.
The current .exe behavior has benefited from many years of tweaking and
fine-tuning, across many different packages (cygwin, gcc, gdb, binutils,
automake, autoconf, libtool, bash, coreutils, ...) to work together to
give the current, mostly coherent, least-surprise behavior we enjoy
today. I strongly caution against making a drastic change like this at
all, and ESPECIALLY against changing the default behavior of tools like
gcc, bash, and coreutils.
--
Chuck
--
Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html
Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
- Raw text -