Re: Make on XP - shell selection?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "grischka" <address@hidden>
> Cc: <address@hidden>
> Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2007 17:00:48 +0200
> 
> > That'd be a terrible
> > cycle killer, because this function would be called on each command
> > invocation.
> 
> But no. Compared to what it takes the OS to spawn (and run!) a process, 
> one path search more or less wont make even the slightest difference.

How long is your Path?  On a typical Windows machine, it tends to be
quite long, what with all kinds of packages that add to it at will.
It's nothing as short as "/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin" on Unix.

No, sorry, I cannot accept a solution that searches PATH before each
command.  Perhaps we should introduce a new interface to the stored
variables, which would store a canonicalized (a.k.a. absolute) file
name (computed only once) for variables, like SHELL, that point to
file names.  Then those parts of the code that need SHELL for running
programs could access that canonicalized file name instead of the
value of SHELL instead.