pathname conversion

[Alex]

On Tue, 23 Sep 1997, John R. Dennis wrote:

> Why is pathname conversion even necessary? When in Rome do as the Romans do.

>From my being on the list quite a while, it seems to me that the main goal
of b18 (this may change by beta 19 and correct me if I'm wrong) is to
provide a UNIX like enviroment to compile programs straight from unix with
as little code changing as possible.

> Cygnus has done a wonderful job of providing free UNIX software on the
> PC. However, I gave up using many of the tools because they don't
> play well in a mixed environment with standard PC tools, mainly because
> the cygnus tools have a path name convention that is (arbitrarily?)
> different from DOS/Win32. Obviously there must be a good reason for
> being different, can someone explain what it is?

Using posix (I guess what that's called) paths makes more sense when
using Unix code, and with multiple drives can be much easier (as sometimes
UNC for me is easier than drive mappings).  If you want to use win32 paths
in your programs there are conversion functions, but most of the gnu
utilities don't use them without mucking around in the code.

- alex

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