On Thu, Mar 30, 2006 at 05:33:31PM +0200, Georg Baum wrote: > I did not yet have time to comment on Enricos patch, I just had a quick look > and the cygwin ifdefs he introduced in frontends/qt2/FileDialog.C don't > seem right. If they are really needed (which I doubt currently, but that > may change after reading the whole patch) we should introduce just another > patch function. That way, we get nice clean code and the ugly stuff is > banned to few files in src/support.
I try to explain again why I did that. In Windows one could use miktex or tetex (by cygwin). But, as things stand now, tetex cannot be used because, for reasons not known to me, it gives an error when a path like "C:/xxx" is output to a .tex file. I think that it is related to the fact that a check for a posix-style absolute path is being made, but I have not read the tetex sources and cannot be sure. I think that in Windows all files output to a .tex file should be obtained by os::latex_file() which, according to the cygwin_path_fix switch, should return either "C:/xxx" or "/cygdrive/c/xxx". So, three functions are needed: 1) os::internal_path for paths used internally by LyX 2) os::external_path for paths intended to be used by external programs 3) os::latex_path for paths going to .tex files In *nix all of them are noops. In native win32 1) and 2) simply differ in the path separator, whereas 3) should give either pseudo-win paths or posix paths according to wheter miktex or tetex is used (this is what cygwin_path_fix tells you). In cygwin, things could be exactly as in *nix, but if you want to allow for miktex, than 3) above should be exactly as for native win32 (as it should be, I mean, not as it is now). However, you could also use other native apps apart from miktex, so it is useful that both 1) and 2) return either posix- or win-style paths. This is to be independent from the cygwin_path_fix switch and in my patch it is done through the "Use Cygwin-style paths" checkbox. As a cygwin app can deal with both posix or win-style paths, we could simply ditch the "Use Cygwin-style paths" checkbox and make 1) and 2) always return pseudo win-style paths (I mean with forward slashes because it seems that most windows programs understand that, even notepad and word have no problems with forward slahes). But chances are high that if you have cygwin, you also use all-cygwin apps, and if one of them tries to be smart about deciding that a path is absolute or not, you are in trouble, because you suddenly find that the current dir path is prepended to your already absolute path. For this reason I think that the checkbox should stay. One input source from which a path is entered is the file dialog, so I simply pass its output to os::internal_path which returns a path in the style dictated by the "Use Cygwin-style paths" checkbox. This is the logic driving my patch and I am sure that it can be implemented in a better way than I did, but I don't want to be one which simply asks for something and I think it is helpful to start from an almost working implementation rather than from scratch. If you do not agree with this vision, I am fine anyway. I do not want to make a pressure on you as I have the sources and can build my own version of LyX. However, the cygwin version that I made available is the one I am using, so if my copy is different from the official sources and this is not acceptable for you, I will not provide other versions if you ask so, as I don't want that you get blamed for it. Anyway, I would like to thank you for LyX which I am using from version 0.10 (I think I still have the COLD program lying on the hard disk). -- Enrico
