Re: make 3.81 and MS-DOS paths (e.g. C: or drive letter paths)

[Kelly O'Hair]

Agreed.

We used cygwin initially because it was free and as far as
unix utility functionality went, had a sane and predictable behavior.
Many of our Solaris/Linux developers had been switching to using
cygwin on Windows, so it was a natural progression many years ago.
Historically, jdk builds had used the MKS ToolKit ($$).

MinGW/MSYS is starting to sound like a better answer, I doubt we could
ever completely disconnect from all Windows utilities that wanted MS-DOS
pathnames.

Much of the OpenJDK Makefile infrastructure is used on all platforms, but the
Windows gyrations are the worst and often the trickiest part of the Makefiles.

Thanks for the reply.

-kto

Christopher Faylor wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 06:27:29PM -0700, Kelly O'Hair wrote:
> > Thanks.  And I understand the "no guarantee" issue, we ran into
> > a problem with find.exe too a while back.
> >
> > I also understand their point of view on these paths being problematic,
> > but unfortunately the OpenJDK build process uses such a mixed bag
> > of tools (misc unix utils, java.exe, cl.exe, rc.exe, rebase.exe, etc.)
> > it's tricky to sort out when to use what kind of pathname.
>
> If the build process uses a mixed bag of tools which take different
> types of path specifications, you sort of get what you pay for.  That
> sounds like something that needs to be fixed.
>
> If there is no real desire for the build process to be UNIX-compatible
> then maybe it should be using pure MinGW tools and eschewing Cygwin
> altogether.  It's hard to see why Cygwin tools would be a benefit in
> this case.
>
> cgf