Why are Windows paths broken in make 3.81?

[Joachim Achtzehnter]

Dave Korn wrote:

> Which begs the question: given that you were working on such a large and
> complex makefile system, and given that it had non-POSIX paths in a makefile,
> and given that it wasn't broke and didn't need fixing ...
> 
> ...  why on EARTH did you deliberately go and upgrade to a new version of make
> that doesn't support non-POSIX paths?

I did not. :-)

Things worked fine for me but a co-worker in another office location kept 
reporting that he can't build the system. After investigating tons of other 
possible reasons why his builds might be failing we eventually hit on the 
possibility that it might be due to differences in the Cygwin versions 
which the two of us would have installed independently at different times 
(in fact, he happened to re-install his PC a few times recently because of 
unrelated problems).

The fact that I didn't expect that the problems had anything to do with 
Cygwin shows how much trust people have in these tools. It also highlights 
the effect a small break with backwards compatibility can have for people 
because these things are expected to just work. This isn' just any 
application, it is the foundation on which everything rests.

Joachim


-- 
work:     joachima@netacquire.com   (http://www.netacquire.com)
private:  joachim@kraut.ca          (http://www.kraut.ca)

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