Subject: Re: change in behavior of make from 3.80 to 3.81
From: Corinna Vinschen <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Cc: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2006 14:09:23 +0200

On Aug 17 05:46, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > > Windows doesn't allow colons anywhere else in file names anyway.
> > 
> > That's not quite right.  Colons are also used in file names when the
> > file name denotes an alternative named stream on NTFS file systems.
> 
> Right, I forgot about this obscure feature.
> 
> However, this feature is not specific to Cygwin, so if support for
> such names is important (I suspect it isn't, but that's me), GNU Make
> should be modified to support them in all Windows ports; any solution
> that is good for other Windows ports will be good for Cygwin, and vice
> versa.  Do you agree?

Hmm, no, sorry.  I can't agree to "any solution that is good for other
Windows ports will be good for Cygwin".  This should be decided on a
case by case basis.

As for the NTFS streams, I mentioned them so that they are not left out
of the discussion.  Personally I agree with you that the support for such
names isn't overly important for make.  The reasin is this:

Colons are only a problem in the TARGETS and PREREQUISITES part of a
make rule, not in the COMMAND part.  But it only makes marginal sense to
use the ADS name for dependency checks, because a file has only one set
of timestamps for the whole file, not multiple timestamps, one per data
stream.  The availablilty on only one filesystem type restricts the
usefulness further.  So the ability to use ADS names in the COMMAND part
of a rule should be sufficient.

Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Project Co-Leader          cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat

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