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

[Bill Hoffman]

So, this has come up on this list before.  You are aware that
cygwin made a change and stopped applying a local patch that allowed
for posix paths and windows paths in the same makefile.   After
much discussion on the cygwin list, it was recommend to move the discussion
here.   The cygwin folks say that if the patch became part of gnu
make proper then obviously it would be part of the next cygwin version
of make, and they will no longer maintain the patch.

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.   Are there existing ideas on how to support
that.

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.

Some ideas:

target: c\:/my/file.c
   cl c\:/my/file.c -o target

target: /c/my/file.c      
   cl /c/my/file.c   # make would have to convert the /c/ to c: when it called 
cl.

target: c:/my/file.c  # this is what the cygwin patch supported
   cl c:/my/file.c

One thing to note, is that the msys approach of converting any / to a mount
path can cause trouble because command line switches to cl get converted to
paths.   So, something like that should be avoided.  Ideas?

Thanks.

-Bill