Re: A few Windows build fixes

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>> > There's a general need for Emacs to understand/accept /cygdrive/foo
>> > names passed on the command-line, so that could be fixed in
>> > lisp/startup.el and lisp/w32*.el.
>> There's cygwin-mount.el available as an elpa package in one of
>> http://tromey.com/elpa or http://marmalade-repo.org/packages/ which
>> works in most cases.

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.


        Stefan