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Re: Why are Windows paths broken in make 3.81?


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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