> From: "John W. Eaton" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2006 18:50:46 -0400 > Cc: cygwin@cygwin.com > > 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.
I hope that the following description will encourage someone to make the necessary contribution. GNU Make already has code that handles MS-DOS style file names. Patches to do that were submitted to GNU Make ages ago, and the GNU Make maintainer did not grow weary of maintaining those patches, since the Windows-specific parts of the Make sources are maintained by volunteers anyway. (I assume that by "GNU Make maintainer" you meant Paul D. Smith, not the maintainer of the Cygwin Make package.) What is missing is a relatively small amount of work to get those portions of the code to compile in the Cygwin build. The relevant code is conditioned on a distinct preprocessing symbol, that is separate of the other symbols that condition the native Win32 support in Make (if someone is interested in stepping forward and doing the job, please ask for details on the make-w32@gnu.org mailing list). However, someone who knows more than I do about intricacies of Cygwin file-name treatment, and, more importantly, someone who can actually test the code in the Cygwin environment, should go carefully through those few portions of the code and see what, if anything, should be done for them to DTRT in the Cygwin build. That is all that is needed. The other part of the burden -- the need to maintain the Cygwin patch in the future -- is IMO a non-issue, as those few volunteers who contribute Windows-specific patches and maintenance (your truly is one of them) will never consciously break anything that is Cygwin related; and given a reasonable amount of commentary near Cygwin-specific portions, I'm sure we will be able to understand what Cygwin expects, enough to prevent any bitrot in the foreseeable future, even if no one from the Cygwin community volunteers to help beyond the initial effort described above. (Of course, the OP can always build a native version of GNU Make 3.81, since it now compiles out of the box with the MinGW port of GCC, and doesn't require any tools whatsoever besides the compiler and Binutils, in order to be built. The resulting binary will support DOS-style file names right away. For running cl as the compiler, I think this is the best alternative anyhow, but that's me.) -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/