Re: bison 2.4.1 on Msys Win7 /usr/local/share/bison/m4sugar/m4sugar.m4

[Dick Dunbar]

It's now pretty clear that bison is not going to work correctly on Msys.
Works perfectly on cygwin, so I used strace to see the flow.

Bison depends on file handler support, which appears to be built into
the "mount" support in cygwin, to translate from Windows to cygwin
style directories.

I thought "cygpath" might be involved (and missing from Msys),
but that made no difference.

Building on cygwin, and running the resulting bison.exe on Msys
using the cygwin dll's also failed.

strace also fails on Msys ... not sure why.

This was just an exercise for me to understand what I might be dealing with
when porting code with Msys .... looks to be more complicated than I
imagined.

I also notice the filesystem on Msys has some hidden behaviour:

$ ls -ld /*
drwxr-xr-x  2 dick Administrators  49152 May  9 19:09 /bin
drwxr-xr-x  2 dick Administrators   4096 May  9 21:53 /etc
drwxr-xr-x  4 dick Administrators      0 May  3 13:21 /home
drwxr-xr-x  6 dick Administrators  65536 May  5 18:40 /include
drwxr-xr-x  2 dick Administrators      0 Dec  3 20:33 /info
drwxr-xr-x  3 dick Administrators  65536 May  9 16:30 /lib
drwxr-xr-x  3 dick Administrators      0 Dec  3 20:33 /libexec
drwxr-xr-x  7 dick Administrators      0 May  8 13:32 /local
drwxr-xr-x  4 dick Administrators      0 Dec  3 20:33 /man
drwxr-xr-x 39 dick Administrators  16384 May  9 21:12 /mingw
drwxr-xr-x  6 dick Administrators      0 May  9 16:31 /mingw32
drwxr-xr-x  2 dick Administrators      0 Dec  3 22:01 /sbin
drwxr-xr-x 16 dick Administrators   4096 May  7 21:59 /share
drwxr-xr-x  3 dick Administrators      0 Aug 13  2009 /var

Notice the absence of /usr in the root directory.
The default for most gnu software uses "prefix=/usr/local"

ls -ld /usr/* .... produces the same result shown above.