Re: Fix for HAVE_DOS_PATHS build on cygwin

[Christopher Faylor]

On Fri, Aug 18, 2006 at 01:55:00PM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> 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.)

Since I can't come up with a failure case, I think it's ok to leave it
as is.  If make doesn't deal with backslashes it will surely be viewed
as yet another attempt on my part to torture people with software.

If problems do crop up, I'll report them here.

cgf