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

[Ken Brown <kbrown@cornell.edu>]

On 6/17/2009 6:23 PM, David Robinow wrote:
> 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.

Thanks for the offer, David, but don't go to any trouble.  I know that I 
could use cygpath to fix browse-url-file-url, but that would require 
special-casing cygwin in browse-url-file-url.  The simpler solution 
using cygstart that I proposed instead does the special-casing in 
browse-url-of-file.  But I don't know if the emacs developers would 
accept a patch with that sort of special-casing in either place.  If so, 
I'll do it however they want.

Ken