From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe@bevo.che.wisc.edu>
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Date: Fri, 28 Jul 2006 11:26:06 -0400
To: "Paul D. Smith" <psmith@gnu.org>
Cc: bug-make@gnu.org, cygwin@cygwin.com
Subject: Re: 3.81 and windows paths
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On 28-Jul-2006, Paul D. Smith wrote:

| This would be very tricky: right now all the code to do DOS vs. POSIX
| pathnames is controlled through #ifdefs, so it's a compile-time thing.
| Changing it to a runtime thing would be a lot of work, I think... the

OK, but I still think it should be implemented as an optional feature
that users can select unless we can prove that the feature doesn't
cause trouble for valid Makefiles that use only Posix filenames.

| #ifdeffing in GNU make is kind of a mess, with all the different ports
| we support.

Yes, that's unfortunate.  I don't think that it is necessary to use an
intricate mess of #ifdefs all throughout a program to achieve
portability to a wide variety of systems.  That seems to be a design
decision that was made fairly early on in the development of Make
(long before you became the maintainer, I would guess).

jwe

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