Re: Overriding LN_S

[Steffen Dettmer]

On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 8:18 AM, Peter Rosin <address@hidden> wrote:
> Den 2010-09-02 21:50 skrev Steffen Dettmer:
>> On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 9:18 PM, Peter Rosin <address@hidden> wrote:
[cp instead of ln -s]
>>
>> couldn't this break dependcies?
>
> I'm using MSVC to cross-compile from the Cygwin environment, so there
> isn't any mixing of neither compilers nor dependencies.

OK, I just asked because we had issues here where constructions
that created symlinks "once" but did no update them all the time,
which is not needed for symlinks - but for copies it was needed of course.
cp instead is pragmatic but might taste a bit like a
"compatiblity hack" or so...

>> Shouldn't "cygpath -w" be used itstead?
>
> "cygpath -w" is certainly a part of it, but has absolutely nothing to
> do with the issue at hand. Libtool has the ability to create soft
> links to the installed libltdl sources and the compiler then has to
> be able to compile those sources "through" those soft links. If the
> compiler doesn't interpret the soft links as soft links, but instead
> as regular files, it has little chance of succeeding. So, I want to
> tell libtool to make copies instead of soft links, as is done on
> systems lacking soft links.

yes I see, of course.
In general, I think it could be seen as part of the issue,
because the system (cygwin) does have softlinks (and are better
than copies), but MSVC and many other tools interpret paths
differently and a translation in form of "cygpath -w" IMHO would
be the clean natural approach (which also works for absolute
paths and outputs those strange backslash-paths potentially
needed by some windows tool etc).
Interestingly, cygpath -w also seems to work for MSYS paths.

oki,

Steffen