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Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2006 13:27:36 -0400
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From: "William A. Hoffman" <billlist AT nycap DOT rr DOT com>
Subject: Re: change in behavior of make from 3.80 to 3.81
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At 11:12 AM 8/21/2006, Christopher Faylor wrote:
>Your messages and those from the other couple of vocal people here have
>done nothing to convince me that this decision was wrong for me.  It has
>done a lot to reinforce my belief that there are vocal people on this
>mailing list who, even when talking about free software, really do not
>"get it".  And, this makes me think that those people could stand a
>little fish teaching.
I am not sure what "fish teaching" is?

However, one thing that might have averted this thread would have been an email
to the cygwin list, (prior to the release announcement) that described the
change you were going to make.

Something like:   make - no longer going to accept non-posix paths.
I have been maintaining a cygwin specific patch to make for a long time
now, and I am no longer interested in doing that.   It is too much work,
and I do not use anything buy POSIX paths in my makefiles anyway.   If anyone
needs/wants this functionality to continue, please post to a fix for make
on make-w32 that will allow for a cygwin build of make to support Windows native
paths.   

It would have done two things:

1. It would be a good link to provide anyone that complained about the missing
feature.

2. It would have let any developer know that you were not opposed to non-POSIX path
support in make, you just did not want to do it in a cygwin specific patch to make
you had been using.  Basically, it is not a waste of time to create the patch because
it will be used.

I don't think it is against the principals of free software to announce changes that
will affect backwards compatibility.  As it was the announcement came after the change
was made.

-Bill


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