Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2006 18:49:02 -0400
From: Christopher Faylor <cgf-no-personal-reply-please AT cygwin DOT com>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: 3.81 and windows paths
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On Thu, Jul 27, 2006 at 03:31:53PM -0700, William Sheehan wrote:
>>There is no advantage using cygwin if you want to use a Makefile which
>>contains MS-DOS paths.  Using MinGW makes perfect sense in that case.
>
>I strongly disagree with this statement.  A primary benefit of using
>Cygwin is that so many Linux-like tools are available from one central
>installer.

Yes.  "Linux-like".

>If you have a Makefile system that uses Cygwin for more than just the
>make binary and binutils (aka more than what MinGW provides),

You quoted email from me which was talking about using a Makefile which
contains MS-DOS paths.  If that is what you want then there is no reason
to install Cygwin's make over mingw's make other than, apparently, the
minimal inconvenience of downloading another tool from another site.

However, if you are mixing MS-DOS paths with UNIX paths then, that is a
different scenario.  That would require modifying makefiles.

>it becomes irritating to developers that they need to install at least
>two software products (Cygwin and MinGW in this case) and create
>special path voodoo just for one product.

This is not as big a deal as you seem to be implying.  Installing
mingw's make is simple.  If you haven't tried it (and it doesn't seem
like you have) then you should.  It is a self-installing binary which
installs a "mingw32-make.exe".  Once it is installed it will be able to
run any tools that are in the PATH, just like Cygwin make.

Either that, or you don't have to upgrade to the latest make from
cygwin.

>I can imagine that the immediate response to this complaint will be
>"fix your Makefiles to work with Cygwin if it's such an important
>component." As others have mentioned, this is no simple task in very
>large Makefile systems that support a wide variety of compilation
>toolchains.  Cygwin make has supported Win32 paths for a long time, so
>much that I would say that people have come to rely on it.  I am not
>saying that the changes are impossible; just that it is a larger
>inconvenience than some may realize.

Again, I posted a script which should go a long way towards converting a
Makefile which uses DOS paths.

cgf

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