Re: colons in Cygwin (was Re: make-3.81-3 (ITA??))

[Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin at cygwin dot com>]

On Jul 17 16:54, Rob Walker wrote:
> Reini Urban wrote:
>> Colons in filenames are fine and will be supported with cygwin-1.7.
>> But c:/ it will not map to the root of some c drive, it will map to the
>> subdir "c:"
>> For now we had to use managed mounts for such names, soon we will be
>> able to see readable names.
>>   
>
> [RGW] This is interesting news to me.  This would break the planned GNU 
> make support for MSDOS paths under Cygwin, wouldn't it?  On which Windows 
> filesystems will this be useful?  In other words, where might one see a 
> directory named "c:" on a Windows box?

Cygwin is a POSIX emulation layer in the first place.  That's what we
are committed to in the first place.  Why would you want to use Win32
paths in a POSIX environment, except as parameter to native Win32 tools?
For dependency tracking in make there's no good reason to use the Win32
path.  You can just as well use the POSIX equivalent.  If you have to
convert between paths, there's the cygpath tool.

As for the directory called c:, you won't see it on most Windows
machines, given that Win32 doesn't allow it.  But you can see it on
POSIX machines and you can even see it on NTFS when using Microsoft's
SFU.  We're not explicitely talking about a dir called X:, but we're
talking about the general ability to use the colon as normal part of a
filename, as every POSIX system user usually can expect.  That leads
me elegantly back to my first sentence...


Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Project Co-Leader          cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat

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