Re: [Mingw-users] Re: MSYS ln -s to directory

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hi Keith,

* Keith MARSHALL wrote on Mon, Apr 10, 2006 at 12:53:13PM CEST:
> Ralf Wildenhues wrote, quoting Ross Ridge:
> >> Hmm... it would be nice to have a way to override it selecting ln -s
> >> on Cygwin.  Bootstrapping a MinGW build of gcc head currently fails
> >> while building libstdc++ on Cygwin because a bunch of symlinks are
> >> created that the newly built MinGW compiler can't see.
> >
> > I guess the followup patch below would do the job.  However, I'm not
> > so sure whether it's the right thing to do...
> 
> No, I doubt if it is.  For normal purposes, Cygwin would want to have
> LN_S='ln -s';

And this is what `configure' would set, unless the user overrides that
by setting LN_S herself.

> it's only for the special case of running a MinGW build
> under Cygwin, that LN_S='cp -p' is appropriate.

Yes.

> Perhaps, if the Makefiles are appropriately set up:
> 
>         make LN_S='cp -p' ...
> 
> would be a better approach, rather than smacking Autoconf to achieve
> this abnormal behaviour.

Yes, that's a possibility; but it's also very normal Autoconf behavior
that its test results are overridable.  You can set $CC to prevent it to
search for another C compiler; AC_PROG_GREP's result is overridden by
$GREP; and so on.

The part I was unsure about wasn't the possibility of an override, but
the speciality of having two variables from different Autoconf layers.

Cheers,
Ralf