Anyway, Beman, can you test whether the attached
patch fixes your problem without the need to specify
the paths to ar and ranlib explicitly? I've checked
that it doesn't break gcc on linux, but I don't have
cygwin installed here.
First try failed: C:/boost/develop/tools/build/src/tools\gcc.jam:293: in .get-prog-name ERROR: rule "cygwin.cygwin-to-windows-path" unknown in module "gcc". ...
I deleted "local" from cygwin.jam line 36, so it read "rule cygwin-to-windows-path ( path )" and then tried again.
That failed with the message: C:/boost/develop/tools/build/src/build\toolset.jam:43: in toolset.using ERROR: rule "cygwin.init" unknown in module "toolset". ...