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Date: Wed, 4 May 2005 11:24:13 -0400
From: Christopher Faylor <cgf-no-personal-reply-please AT cygwin DOT com>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: pwd vs $PWD, bash, cygwin vs Linux
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On Wed, May 04, 2005 at 08:05:40AM -0700, Peter Farley wrote:
>But what if it is *not* your Makefile,

I just went back and reread this thread.  It isn't exactly clear that
this was not your Makefile.  You mentioned a "test setup" which seemed
to imply that you were using your own Makefiles.

>but someone else's, e.g.  the many GNU source packages that expect bash
>behavior?

Most GNU packages are interested in being portable.  Assuming that every
system out there is POSIX compliant is not portable.  I have a couple of
older systems that I use which would have the same problems as cygwin
if you use PWD in a Makefile.  Actually, CURDIR would also be a problem
for them since they don't use GNU make.  Since the workaround is trivial
it would make sense to not rely on PWD in any package that is supposed
to be disseminated widely.

>Surely you don't intend that ordinary users (well, OK, anyone compiling
>from a source package isn't really "ordinary") should modify every
>package maintained by GNU in order to make it under cygwin, do you?

I would expect a GNU-maintained package to accept a patch to eliminate a
potential problem source.

However, I surely don't intend to keep talking about this any further.
I get the feeling that you want us (i.e., cygwin maintainers) to do
something globally to solve this.  We've been using ash for many years
and we're not about to change anytime soon.  You've been given enough
alternatives now that you should be able to get things working.

Cygwin is not guaranteed to be 100% POSIX compliant or 100% linux
compliant.  Sometimes we make tradeoffs because of Windows constraints.
Since bash is noticeably slower than ash under Cygwin, we use ash as our
/bin/sh.  That produces some problems for non-portable shell constructs.

cgf

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