Subject: RE: Geomview & Cygwin setup
From: Lloyd Wood <[email-masked]>
To: "Dave Korn" <[email-masked]>
Cc: <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2006 15:58:50 +0100

At Friday 2006-04-28 15:17 +0100, Dave Korn wrote:
> > __CYGWIN__ is defined for gcc; gcc -v should report 'cygwin special'.
> > I do not recommend changing the environment to __CYGMING__ to match
> > in a further attempt at humour.
> >
> > If you want people to use the information you provide rationally, do
> > not colour that information with irrational attempts at humour to
> > provide misinformation that causes doubt.
> >
> > We need to trust the output of gcc -v.
>
>   No, this is completely wrong and absolutely not what you want to do.  The
>output of "gcc -v" is a human-readable summary of various internal information
>which can be obtained by more reliable means for programmatic use.  Your
>attempt to indirectly deduce the same info from a freeform text string
>presupposes many assumptions that simply do not hold, and therefore is doomed
>to incorrectness.

In that case, gcc -v may as well return an empty string, since, as 
you say, it's always going to be wrong, and because obviously even 
humans have trouble parsing its output.

L.

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