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From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe AT bevo DOT che DOT wisc DOT edu>
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Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2006 18:50:46 -0400
To: Joachim Achtzehnter <joachima AT netacquire DOT com>
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Subject: Re: change in behavior of make from 3.80 to 3.81
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A recap, as I understand it (please correct me if I'm wrong):

  * The version of GNU Make for Cygwin used to support MS-DOS
    filenames.  This feature was not part of GNU Make if you compiled
    the sources for Cygwin out of the box, but was something that was
    added and maintained as a separate patch.

  * The maintainer of the GNU Make package grew weary of maintaining
    the patch and decided to drop it.

  * Lots of people are complaining.

  * The maintainer of the GNU Make package for Cygwin has repeatedly
    made it clear that no amount of complaining will result in the
    patch being maintained and applied to any future GNU Make package
    for Cygwin.  My understanding is that the central problem is the
    amount of effort required to update the patch with each new
    release of GNU Make, not that the feature itself is necessarily
    bad, though there may be some obscure problems such that it would
    be better if the feature could be optional, either with a
    command-line option or special Makefile directive.

  * You are now taking this to mean that the Cygwin maintainers don't
    care about users and you are suggesting that this could result in
    a fork of Cygwin (good luck with that).

Please, this makes absolutely no sense.

This whole problem could be solved if the people who are complaining
about the Cygwin version of GNU Make directed their efforts toward
getting a patch accepted in the GNU Make sources that handles MS-DOS
style filenames when GNU Make is compiled for Cygwin.  Then there
would be no need to maintain a separate patch just for the Cygwin
package of GNU Make.

Or am I missing something?

jwe

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