RE: Is perl-5.8.2 canonized for use on cygwin yet?

[Igor Pechtchanski <pechtcha at cs dot nyu dot edu>]

On Mon, 29 Dec 2003, Blair P. Houghton wrote:

> >The trailing backslashes aren't necessary. I've removed them in my LIB
> >and INCLUDE environment variables and VC works just fine. You could try
> >removing them and see if that fixes the perl build.
>
> Well, you can remove them manually; but this is a computer and it should
> do the work.  The next time, VC might break if you remove them, so you
> couldn't remove them.  Cygwin should account for this sort of behavior
> in Windows-installed environment strings.  It's a nontrivial change to
> the code that execs the cygwin program from within the encompassing
> Windows program, though.
>
> --Blair

This is not a question of removing the backslashes or unixifying paths.
There is a clash between an environment variable that MSVC needs (and
arrogantly sets in the environment) and an optional one for the perl
build.  If you had another (Cygwin) program that needed $LIB set to
something else (in your .bashrc), you wouldn't hesitate to unset it for
the perl build (once you've discovered the clash), so why the dilemma now?
Cygwin imports the environment variables from the outside (Windows)
environment intact, with two exceptions: (1) those that are needed for the
normal working of Cygwin (e.g., PATH, TMP, HOME) are unixified, and (2)
some are overridden in the default /etc/profile and ~/.bashrc.  This is
done so that Windows programs that may need those variables will still
work.  Further, the first kind of variable is converted back to Win32
format before calling Windows programs (for the exact same reason).  I
doubt that any further kind of transformation is going to be performed by
Cygwin.

If you wish, you can add some code to your ~/.bashrc (or the .rc for your
favorite shell) to eliminate trailing backslashes in all variables (and
perhaps remove quotes inside them, another common problem).  In this
particular case, I'd suggest simply unsetting LIB in your ~/.bashrc since
you're unlikely to invoke MSVC constituent programs from the Cygwin shell.
	Igor
-- 
				http://cs.nyu.edu/~pechtcha/
      |\      _,,,---,,_		pechtcha@cs.nyu.edu
ZZZzz /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_		igor@watson.ibm.com
     |,4-  ) )-,_. ,\ (  `'-'		Igor Pechtchanski, Ph.D.
    '---''(_/--'  `-'\_) fL	a.k.a JaguaR-R-R-r-r-r-.-.-.  Meow!

"I have since come to realize that being between your mentor and his route
to the bathroom is a major career booster."  -- Patrick Naughton

--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/