Re: Fix for HAVE_DOS_PATHS build on cygwin

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2006 15:50:11 -0400
> From: Bill Hoffman <address@hidden>
> 
> >I'm not a make maintainer and don't really care about this one way or
> >the other.
> [...]
> I am not a make maintainer either, and care even less than you.

Sorry, Bill, you lost me here: I thought you _did_ care about this,
since you submitted the patch and evidently did some testing, enough
to find a couple more issues that needed to be solved.

I'm willing to work with you (or someone else) to get the
Cygwin-related patch for drive letter support polished enough to be
ready for me to ask Paul to accept it.  But I need active help from a
motivated individual to do that, otherwise this is never going to
work, as I don't even have Cygwin installed, and don't plan on
installing it.  I can suggest ideas, provide general advice, and test
your changes in the native build, to make sure it doesn't break, but I
need someone motivated enough to do the actual work on the Cygwin
side.

> At this point I think we are nit-picking.   The changes are relatively
> small, and there are several ways to get it to work.   Is there
> a general buy in for the concept of this change?   Or am I just
> wasting my time tweaking the patch.

Please don't go overboard.  Chris just made some comments about the
patch, he didn't say the patch should be rejected.  It will take me a
day or so to review the patches and the discussion, and make up my
mind about them; please wait for a while.

As for the ``general buy'', you've already got it: after all, it was I
who suggested to solve the problem in the way you did.

> The nit-picking issues
> should really be decided by a make maintainer which means someone
> other than you or me.   I will await instruction/comment from
> a make maintainer before creating a third patch.  Or perhaps a make
> maintainer can make the changes as they fit.

I'm guessing that the Make maintainer waits for me and other Windows
volunteers to speak up their mind about the patch.

> In summary,  HAVE_DOS_PATHS needs a few minor changes to compile under
> cygwin.   The patch given and the emails show a few ways to do this change.
> The next step is to make HAVE_DOS_PATHS the default for cygwin builds.

I, like Chris, prefer that HAVE_DOS_PATHS be turned on for Cygwin in
configure.in.  That is the best place for doing such things on any
platform that uses the configure script.  Could you try submitting
such a patch, please?