Re: A few Windows build fixes

[Andy Moreton <andrewjmoreton@gmail.com>]

On Thu 01 Sep 2011, Vijay Lakshminarayanan wrote:

> Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:
>
>> cygwin-mount.el is a good package, but it has at least the following
>> problems:
>> - it affects all file-name operations within Emacs.  That's good if you
>>   (the user) want to pretend that Emacs understands cygwin names and
>>   want to be able to type them in, perform completion and stuff.  But it
>>   is too intrusive otherwise.
>> - it can bump into ambiguities ("/home" can mean the "home" subdir in
>>   cygwin's root directory, or it can mean C:/home).  This is not
>>   cygwin-mount's fault, but because of how it works, it doesn't try to
>>   solve those ambiguities too carefully.
>>
>> So what I proposed above is to use something that also understands
>> cygwin file names, but only at those places in the code where it's
>> likely to appear (i.e. for file names that come from outside Emacs), at
>> which point we can more easily try and resolve ambiguities and we're less
>> likely to introduce problems.
>
> Going through w32-fns.el, I see there's `w32-convert-standard-filename'
> which actually replaces /cygdrive/ paths correctly.  Indeed, 
>
> (convert-standard-filename
>  "/cygdrive/c/programs/emacs-24.0.50/lisp/w32-fns.el")
>
> ; => "c:\\programs\\emacs-24.0.50\\lisp\\w32-fns.el"
>
> does the right thing.

This is buggy. The '/cygdrive' prefix can be replaced per-user or system
wide - see the cygwin mount(1) manpage for details.

    AndyM