Re: Emacs vista build failures

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: David Kastrup <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden,  address@hidden
> Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:24:38 +0200
> 
> Yes, since COMMAND.COM and CMD.EXE behave quite differently, and also
> differently on different versions of Windows.

And zsh behaves differently from Bash which behaves differently from
the Borne shell.

> So tell me: How to you quote the word (written as Lisp string) 
> "\"goof\" " to the typical Windows shell?

See the Emacs makefiles for Windows.

> >> There are consequences: for example, call-process and its ilk don't work
> >> reliably.  You can't expect the arguments given to them to actually make
> >> it unmolested to the argc/argv of the called program's "main".
> >
> > Only because the surrounding code expects a Posix-compliant set of
> > functions and syscalls.  It was not written with portability in mind
> > from the ground up.
> 
> I often doubt it was written with anything in mind.  As it stands, it is
> a half-baked pseudo-Posix wrappery about CP/M calling conventions.

I was talking about Emacs code that implements call-process and its
subroutines.

> When looking at design and implementation of first DOS and later
> Windows, I often had the feeling "this is so stupid and braindead that I
> can hardly believe it".  With UNIX, the feeling was more often "I wish I
> would have thought of that".

Are you sure you know the design and implementation of DOS and Windows
well enough to say this?