Re: Cygwin patches

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:26:12 -0500
> From: Ken Brown <kbrown@cornell.edu>
> Cc: Emacs <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
> 
> 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.

I think that the right fix would be in browse-url-file-url, so that it
does return a correctly converted URL.  Using cygstart directly in
browse-url-of-file deviates too much from what other platforms do --
they all invoke the browser in browse-url.  Such a deviation could
mean maintenance headaches in the future.  For example, browse-url
takes care of setting the environment for the process being invoked,
while your patch short-circuits that for Cygwin.