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Message-ID: <3E2D898D.8030201@yahoo.com>
Date: Tue, 21 Jan 2003 12:55:25 -0500
From: Earnie Boyd <earnie_boyd AT yahoo DOT com>
Reply-To: cygwin-developers AT cygwin DOT com
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To: "Gerald S. Williams" <gsw AT agere DOT com>
CC: cygwin-developers AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: True case-sensitive filenames
References: <GBEGLOMMCLDACBPKDIHFOEADDBAA DOT gsw AT agere DOT com>
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Gerald S. Williams wrote:
> Earnie Boyd wrote:
> 
>>IMNSHO, the problem is with the project that uses files that differ only 
>>in case.  It's not portable, and if the project wishes portability, then 
>>the practice must stop.  I urge you to raise an argument with the 
>>package maintainers accompanied with a patch.  Changing Cygwin to handle 
>>the problem isn't going to cause these problems to disappear as not all 
>>environments will support it.
> 
> 
> Taking the high road, huh? :-)
> 
> Of course, many of the people you'd have to convince
> would argue that the problem is with Windows.
> 

The argument has nothing to do with Windows vs Unix.

> I'm not taking sides on that debate. But I have run
> into these naming issues enough times to say that,
> for me, it would be really nice to have POSIX naming
> as an option.
> 

Nice, but it's still not portable.

> Another problem I've run into recently is that the
> people who ARE interested in portability are already
> taking the trouble to port their package to Windows.
> More often than not, this actually interferes with a
> Cygwin build, since they start adding WIN32 checks
> throughout the code, taking into consideration not
> only platform issues but also compiler weirdness. It
> would be nice if we can "beat them to the punch" and
> have a Cygwin port first. To this end, being able to
> deal with such files may give us a head start.
> 

Adding filters for WIN32 shouldn't affect a Cygwin build at all.  WIN32 
is only defined if you use -mno-cygwin, -mwin32 or include windows.h. 
As for compiler specificness, I agree, I've just run into #ifdef 
__MSVC__ in a package instead of _WIN32.  But again the argument is 
portability and nothing else.

Earnie.