Re: [jamboost] Re: cygwin bjam support of windows-based tools

From: David Abrahams (dave_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-04-21 16:05:09

Andre Hentz <gclbb-jamboost_at_[hidden]> writes:

> On Mon, 21 Apr 2003, David Abrahams wrote:
>
>>
>> Now that we've finally got msvc and borland to work properly under
>> Cygwin, I've come to the conclusion that it may be neccessary to build
>> in some core jam support for windows-style paths. The alternative of
>> using backquoted invocations of `cygpath` is simply too awful to
>> tolerate (see tools/build/new/msvc.jam). This is important especially
>
> I just wanted to add my support for not using cygpath. Besides
> making it too difficult to maintain, cygpath requires the argument to be a
> existing file or directory (so `cygpath -d /tmp/new_file.rsp` will return
> the empty string).

Yes, that means you end up with `cygpath -d $(X:D)`\\$(X:D=)

ugly.

[snip]

> The other option is to have cygwin use backslashes (win32-style)
> all the time. 

It doesn't work all the time; some cygwin tools require native paths.

> I tried that once but notice bjam should also be changed
> (because target biding adds the last slash to the directory name, if I'm
> not mistaken). Once I changed bjam, problems regarding proper escaping
> started to pop up so I gave up.
>
>> I'm not diving right in to do it immediately because:
>>
>> 1. I want to make sure this is the only core change which is
>> immediately needed, especially in the area of path
>> translation. There are a number of other functions at
>> http://cygwin.com/cygwin-api/cygwin-api.html which might be
>> worth exposing.
>>
>
> Perhaps a platform dependent way of escaping arguments. Or a
> platform independent way of executing commands, something like exec().

Not sure what you're suggesting. Could you be more concrete?
-- 
Dave Abrahams
Boost Consulting
www.boost-consulting.com