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Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2006 17:16:38 -0700
From: Michael Eager <eager AT eagercon DOT com>
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Subject: Re: 3.81 and windows paths
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Christopher Faylor wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 27, 2006 at 05:09:16PM -0400, Paul D. Smith wrote:
>> In fact, I'm wondering if there is an advantage to building GNU make
>> using the Cygwin environment, vs. using a native MingW (for example)
>> build of GNU make?  I'm afraid I'm woefully ignorant about the details.
> 
> 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.
> Despite having suggested this repeatedly, it seems some users are still
> not clear on this concept.

When I ran into this problem, it was because there was a
WINDOWS environment symbol referenced in a dependency.
It's not practical to change the environment symbol -- it is
used by both makefiles and native windows programs.  Nor is it
practical to re-write the paths in the makefile -- because the
makefile needs to reference this (and other) shared environment symbols,
which are not fixed in the makefile.

There are two equally unpleasant resolutions recommended:
either install two products (Cygwin and MinGW) or retain
a back-level version of make, forgoing all future bug fixes.
Neither are very good, but I've opted for the second choice.

It seems to me that it should be possible to have the
DOS path within quotes, so that it doesn't trigger make's
pattern matching syntax.  That would be a more acceptable
solution than the other two.

-- 
Michael Eager	 eager AT eagercon DOT com
1960 Park Blvd., Palo Alto, CA 94306  650-325-8077

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