Re: 3.81 and windows paths

[Paul D. Smith]

%% "John W. Eaton" <address@hidden> writes:

  jwe> On 28-Jul-2006, Paul D. Smith wrote:

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

  jwe> If this could cause some valid Makefiles to do the wrong thing as
  jwe> cgf suggests might happen,

Hm.  I don't think I saw that message?

Certainly there are obscure cases where enabling DOS path support will
behave differently, but they're pretty rare I believe.  Is this a Cygwin
thing?

  jwe> then can we at least make the behavior optional, perhaps with a
  jwe> command line option or magic target (maybe
  jwe> ".WINDOWS_FILENAMES:")?

This would be very tricky: right now all the code to do DOS vs. POSIX
pathnames is controlled through #ifdefs, so it's a compile-time thing.
Changing it to a runtime thing would be a lot of work, I think... the
#ifdeffing in GNU make is kind of a mess, with all the different ports
we support.

Honestly, I don't see a lot of benefit to it.  On a Windows system, even
in Cygwin, I would assume that everyone would always expect anything
that looked like a Windows pathname to be treated like a Windows
pathname.  We're not talking about enabling this support on UNIX, just
in Cygwin.

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