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Message-ID: <17609.11894.362091.111863@lemming.engeast.baynetworks.com>
Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2006 17:21:58 -0400
To: Brian Dessent <brian AT dessent DOT net>, cygwin AT cygwin DOT com, bug-make AT gnu DOT org
Subject: Re: 3.81 and windows paths
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From: "Paul D. Smith" <psmith AT gnu DOT org>
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%% I wrote:

  pds> I believe that this support is limited to handling drive letters without
  pds> choking on the ":", actually: IIRC the native support still requires
  pds> forward slashes (/) rather than backslashes (\).  I could be wrong
  pds> though.  I'm not sure how Cygwin's pathname management patches worked.

  pds> In fact, I'm wondering if there is an advantage to building GNU make
  pds> using the Cygwin environment, vs. using a native MingW (for example)
  pds> build of GNU make?  I'm afraid I'm woefully ignorant about the details.

Now that I think about this more...

There is a separate #define use to enable/disable special handling of
DOS pathnames in vanilla GNU make:

    HAVE_DOS_PATHS

This feature is not controlled by the generic WINDOWS32 #define.

I don't see any reason, offhand, that HAVE_DOS_PATHS couldn't be set in
the Cygwin build of GNU make, even though that build is otherwise using
standard POSIX and not the Windows system API.  In theory that would
very easily allow the Cygwin build of GNU make to continue to be a
Cygwin application, but with added support for DOS pathnames similar to
what you get if you build for native Windows.

Of course I've never tried this combination so there may be more to it
(it may use some special functions under the w32 directory, and/or there
may be some incorrectly #ifdef'd sections of code that need to be
fixed).


But, it might be worth pursuing.

-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Paul D. Smith <psmith AT gnu DOT org>          Find some GNU make tips at:
 http://www.gnu.org                      http://make.paulandlesley.org
 "Please remain calm...I may be mad, but I am a professional." --Mad Scientist

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