Re: Fix for HAVE_DOS_PATHS build on cygwin

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2006 17:32:19 -0400
> From: Christopher Faylor <address@hidden>
> 
> >What is best should be decided by the Cygwin community, so you may
> >wish to discuss this on the Cygwin list.  (If it matters, my advice
> >would be to allow only the forward slashes for the Cygwin port, as it
> >gives enough rope to get things done for minimal risk, and because
> >backslashes are not 100% supported even in the native builds.)
> >
> >Whatever the decision, this is precisely the reason why the patch we
> >eventually decide upon should be tested with as many Cygwin Makefile's
> >as possible.
> 
> I guess my concern is that there will be times where a '\' will not
> be interpreted as a quoting character when it really should be.
> 
> I can't think of any examples, though.

The only examples I can think of is passing \b and \n to programs like
`echo' or `printf'.  Even then, I'm not sure I can come up with a
specific case where the current code would cause a failure.

So, Chris, are you okay with leaving this behavior in the Cygwin
build, or do you wish to opt for a safer /-only support for drive
letters?  We need to make a decision, and I'd rather have yours than
decide on my own.  (I didn't see any discussion of this on the Cygwin
list, either.)