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Date: Fri, 28 Jul 2006 17:31:31 -0400
To: 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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%% Christopher Faylor <cgf-no-personal-reply-please AT cygwin DOT com> writes:

  >> Or is there something special going on that means this won't work?

  cf> I think this has been answered later in the thread, but the short answer
  cf> is - the MinGW make won't recognize the cygwin mount table or symlinks,
  cf> so you can't use cygwin paths in a MinGW makefile without resorting to
  cf> something like "cygpath".

Aha.  Gotcha.  Yes that would be a problem.

  >> Regardless, I still wonder whether my idea of building make for a POSIX
  >> environment with Cygwin, but setting HAVE_DOS_PATHS explicitly, would
  >> work.

  cf> I briefly thought that this might be a possibility but I've since
  cf> remembered cases where people complained about their linux
  cf> makefiles not working correctly due to the colon handling in 3.80.

Hm.  I just can't think of any but the most obscure cases where this is
true.  The DOS pathname handling in vanilla GNU make, as far as I know,
is very specific: if and ONLY if the first character of a pathname is a
letter and the second is a colon, then the path is considered a DOS
path.  The only constructs where the meaning is ambiguous would be very
rare; something like:

    foo : c:bar

should this be interpreted as a static pattern rule:

    foo : c : bar

or with the DOS path "c:bar"?  In this case it's obvious to us since the
latter leads to a syntax error but of course make doesn't know that when
it's parsing tokens.


Any ambiguity is trivially solved by adding whitespace before and/or
after the ":" in target rules.


To be clear: I'm certainly not suggesting that enabling HAVE_DOS_PATHS
will always behave correctly for any valid POSIX makefile, or even any
potentially valid Linux makefile.  However, it seems quite rare to run
into a conflict, so much so that I'm not sure it's worth worrying about.

I suppose there might be some backslash issues.  I really don't remember
what HAVE_DOS_PATHS does with backslashes in target/prerequisite
pathnames.


YM, of course, MV :-)

-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 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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