RE: [Axiom-developer] [build-improvements] msys and double-colon

[Bill Page]

On April 10, 2007 11:55 AM Gabriel Dos Reis wrote:
> 
>   With a recent version of msys (Windows XP), I'm seeing a
> surprising behaviour where the '::' in boottran::boottoclc
> will be passed to the Lisp image as a semicolon!  I don't know
> whether is GCL doign it or msys, but I think it is msys.

Do you mean when passed via the command line? I think MSYS does
do some mangling of things it thinks might be file names. There
is a difference for Windows in the PATH separator - Windows
uses ; instead of :. Perhaps that is relevant. But you might
want to report this to the MSYS developers.

> 
>   Another hunk of this patch concerns the use of "ln -s".
> With Autoconf-2.60 and later, Autoconf test all possible ways
> of using "ln -s" (between files, from files to directories,
> etc.) and if any of those possibilities fails, Autoconf
> deduces that "ln -s" is unusable on the platform, therefore
> default to "cp -p".  In the cases where we use "ln -s", it is
> for just creating a symlink to a directory (which works
> on msys) and the fallback "cp -p" just does not work for that
> situation!

As far as I know autoconf is right and Windows does not support
symlinks. I recall that MSYS actually internally "implements"
'ln -s' as a copy. I am not sure why you say 'cp -p' doesn't
work. What error do you get?

> So, I explicitly set LN_S to "ln -s" -- that is incorrect
> for theoretical maximum portability, but from practical
> portability point of view, it is OK.
> 
> Tested on an i686-pc-linux and i686-pc-mingw32.
> Committed to build-improvements.
> ...

Thank you for you continuing work to support a Windows version
of Axiom in the build-improvements branch.

Regards,
Bill Page.