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Re: change in behavior of make from 3.80 to 3.81


> From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe@bevo.che.wisc.edu>
> 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.)

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