Re: cygwin patch for gnu make ( change from 3.80 to 3.81)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2006 13:58:44 -0400
> From: "William A. Hoffman" <address@hidden>
> 
> So, I guess this is a feature request.   It would be nice to have
> a mode in gnu make that supported posix's paths with windows drive
> letter specifications.

I don't think there's a need for a special mode; see below.

> The big issue to me seems to be:
> 
> target: c:/my/file.c
>   cl c:/my/file.c -o target
> 
> 
> Make get confused with the : in the path.  Is there some syntax that
> can be added to gnu make to support the specification of drive letter
> mounts.

GNU Make already has code to handle this on DOS/Windows platforms: see
the parts conditioned by HAVE_DOS_PATHS.  All you need to do is make
sure that symbol is defined in the Cygwin build.  But please go
through the code under that condition and verify that it does TRT for
Cygwin.

If you are thinking about literal `:' characters in file names, then I
don't think this is possible, even with Cygwin: MS-Windows doesn't
allow such characters in file names, except after the drive letter.
So I don't see anything that Make should do for Cygwin that it doesn't
do for the native Windows builds.  In particular, there's no need for
a special mode of Make; this support for drive letters can be always
on.  Or am I missing something?