Re: change in behavior of make from 3.80 to 3.81

[mwoehlke <mwoehlke@tibco.com>]

Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> On Aug 16 14:17, Bob Rossi wrote:
>>>> I think your solution is well stated.  Does anyone know who was
>>>> maintaining the old patch to make, so that a discussion with that
>>>> person could be made more substantial on a technical level?
>>> And ^^^this^^^ is a perfect example of why this discussion is so
>>> frustrating.
>>>
>>> Does someone *really* have to tell you who was "maintaining the old
>>> patch"?  If you really need to be told this then you really don't have
>>> the right to an opinion on this subject at all since you clearly haven't
>>> been paying any attention.
>> I think you are all to knowledgeable about cygwin and should step back
>> and think about people that use Cygwin as a black box and understand
>> absolutely nothing about it or it's development process. The frustration
> 
> This has nothing to do with Cygwin's development process.  Cygwin is a
> POSIX environment after all.  It's one of if's design targets to get rid
> of the DOS paths.  People using Cygwin with DOS paths are using Cygwin
> for something it was not designed for.  This whole complaint comes up
> because people are using Cygwin in a non-standard way.  I'm wondering
> why nobody complains that Linux doesn't understand drive letters.

Well, the obvious answer is because Linux doesn't *have* drive letters. ;-)

>> you are expressing is understandable to me. However, with a little
>> managerial effort on your part, you could use your knowledge (if you so 
>> choose) to help the rest of us organize a productive way to develop a
>> patch to the upstream make. I thought Corinna spoke very well on this
>> matter, and is why I even bothered responding to this list.
> 
> Maybe you got me wrong.  I have a very strange feeling about getting
> told my point of view would be right, while in the same sentence you're
> kicking cgf's ass.  Just for the records: My design goals for Cygwin
> are that it works fine as a POSIX environment, not that it works fine
> to run DOS tools.  That's a nice side-effect at best.

Just to jump over to the other side here for a second... I assume you 
don't intend to ever make it /impossible/ to run DOS tools on Cygwin? 
That IMO *would* be unacceptable and unrealistic. But, of course, that's 
what interface tools - like cygpath - are for. IOW, the ability to offer 
a "pure POSIX" environment is good, as long as it does not preclude any 
communication whatsoever (no matter how clunky) with Windows.

I think I've made my position on the 'make' decision known; I have 
absolutely no problems with it, and I support it. Just as long as I can 
still pipe between DOS and Cygwin applications(*), share file systems, 
and have something like 'cygpath', Cygwin can (and should) be as 
POSIX-like as it wants. :-)

(* Interix is even worse, here! For pipes to work, you have to call all 
DOS programs from an Interix wrapper program! ...but even that is 
acceptable because it still *can* be done.)

-- 
Matthew
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