Re: proposed patch to re-execute "configure" with a LINENO-grokking shell

[Paul Eggert]

> From: "Tim Van Holder" <address@hidden>
> Date: Sun, 7 Oct 2001 12:13:29 +0200
> 
> The whole problem with ':' is that it is the drive separator on DOS.
> Otherwise, transliterating ':' to ';' would indeed be a much cleaner
> method.

So, what you're saying is that DOS shells do not conform to POSIX, at
least not in this respect.  POSIX says that the path separator is ":".

> Some environments, like cygwin, handle this by using '/cygdrive/C/'
> instead of C:/.  DJGPP has partial support for this; it's libc can use
> /dev/C, but only its bash has special PATH handling to support ': as
> pathsep properly.

Both of those are good enough.  We can just use the POSIX semantics
for them.

> OS/2 has no special handling at all.

So there's a tradeoff here.  Should we continue to rewrite good chunks
of Autoconf, and of some applications that use Autoconf, in ways that
are tricky and hard to maintain, in order to support using "configure"
on OS/2?  Or should we ask the OS/2 guys to add support for PATH along
the lines of Cygwin and DJGPP -- support that is good enough to
support standard POSIX semantics?

If those are the only two choices, I know which one I'd choose.


However, for the particular task at hand, I don't think it matters, as
you've indicated that all the DOSish shells support LINENO, so the
code in question will never be executed on DOS.  In that case, there's
no reason to complicate the code for DOS.