Re: [Chicken-users] CMake/MinGW build 325 is using wrong (Unix) filename separat

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Ian Oversby wrote:
> > A possibly stupid question: when using mingw32, one uses the normal
> > Windows shell, right? In that case the proper pathname directory
> > separator should be "\". Here is another patch that fixes a bug which 
> > resulted in "/" separators on mingw32:
>
> [snip]
>
> In fact, this is a good question.  I'm not really that knowledgable 
> about MinGW but it seems that there are three shells you might want to 
> use: cygwin, mingw and the normal windows shell.  I built chicken with 
> MSYS with uses forward slashes (although it horribly [or nicely 
> depending on your point of view!] mangles the rest of the windows 
> path, e.g. c:\chicken becomes /c/chicken).  This being the case, I 
> should presumably not apply the patch and install all the extensions I 
> want from MSYS.  I'll try that.


To be technically precise, there is no "mingw" shell.  People primarily 
use MinGW either under the MSYS shell, or on the normal Windows command 
line.  These are the 2 cases that must be supported robustly.  I have 
been doing all my development under MSYS, so I have probably failed at 
straight command line stuff.  I thought Chicken used forward slash paths 
internally and did conversions at some point, so I've been feeding it 
forward slashes in the pathnames.

Using MinGW under a Cygwin shell sounds pathological, kinky, error 
prone, unlikely, and not something we should worry about supporting.  
People use MinGW to abandon Cygwin, so that they're not tied to its 
GPL.  Yes it is possible to get some kind of MinGW behavior by passing 
certain flags to the *Cygwin* compiler.  I don't know much about this 
and am not going to be putting any testing time into this.  If someone 
is heavily using Cygwin with MinGW flags, they can do the support / 
testing work for this and contribute it to Chicken.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every