Re: browse-url/w32-shell-execute problems on cygwin

[David Robinow <drobinow@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 12:06 PM, Jason Rumney<jasonr@gnu.org> wrote:
> Ken Brown wrote:
...
>>  (browse-url-file-url "/home/kbrown/html/index.html")
>>
>> yields "file:/home/kbrown/html/index.html", but (on my system) it would
>> need to be "file://d:/cygwin-1.7/home/kbrown/html/index.html" for the
>> windows browser to be able to handle it.
>
> That is a general problem with cygwin interacting with non-cygwin programs.
> Cygwin invents its own virtual filesystem that is not understood outside of
> cygwin. See the problems the native build of Emacs faces with Cygwin make. I
> don't see how bypassing browse-url fixes this for you, as the path will
> still be one that Windows does not recognize.

This is a somewhat different problem since in this case Emacs is a
cygwin program.
  cygpath -m  /home/kbrown/html/index.html
will return a suitable windows name
(c:/cygwin17/kbrown/html/index.html  on my system)

It should be relatively simple to incorporate that transformation
directly into a cygwin-specific function. I did something similar for
cygwin make some years ago to get it to build windows emacs.
I'll see if I can find the code. It's been a while.