Re: Cygwin patches

[Ken Brown <kbrown@cornell.edu>]

On 11/20/2009 4:50 PM, Chong Yidong wrote:
> Ken Brown <kbrown@cornell.edu> writes:
> 
>> Now that you're preparing for emacs 23.2, could you please apply the
>> cygwin patches that I submitted last June?
> 
> Thanks, I've checked in your changes, except for the following:
> 
>> --- origsrc/lisp/net/browse-url.el	2009-11-20 11:34:25.000000000 -0500
>> +++ src/lisp/net/browse-url.el	2009-11-20 11:35:28.000000000 -0500
>> @@ -693,7 +693,9 @@
>>  	  (cond ((not (buffer-modified-p)))
>>  		(browse-url-save-file (save-buffer))
>>  		(t (message "%s modified since last save" file))))))
>> -  (browse-url (browse-url-file-url file))
>> +  (if (eq system-type 'cygwin)
>> +      (shell-command (concat "cygstart " (shell-quote-argument file)))
>> +    (browse-url (browse-url-file-url file)))
>>    (run-hooks 'browse-url-of-file-hook))
> 
> I still don't understand why cygwin needs special handling when, e.g.,
> the other Windows ports don't.  Could you explain?

Cygwin provides a linux-like environment for Windows, but it doesn't 
provide its own web browser.  So it's natural for a cygwin user to just 
want to use the default Windows browser.  And cygwin provides the 
"cygstart" command precisely to make this sort of thing easy.  Thus

   cygstart /unix/style/path/to/file.html

will open file.html in the default Windows browser.  Cygstart takes care 
of converting the path to a form that Windows understands.  Without my 
patch, (browse-url-file-url file) returns a URL that doesn't get 
correctly converted.

Ken

Without my patch,