Re: [Mingw-msys] Using MSYS paths in programs

[Earnie B. <ear...@ya...>]

Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll wrote:
> [Sorry if this message is duplicated -- I just noticed I used the wrong e-mail 
> address when sending the previous copy]
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I am quite sure someone must have explained this somewhere, but really I
> cannot find any documentation shown how to do the following.
> 
> I have a program that compiles and runs in many different unix environments
>  by means of "configure". The program in question is a Lisp interpreter
>  called ECL (http://ecl.sf.net).
> 
> I gave MSYS an attempt and it works almost fine, except when my program tries
> to locate files. My feeling is that MSYS forces, during configuration
> process, all pathnames from windows format to what I would call
> "MSYS-format". However, when I build my program, the open(), fopen(), and
> other functions do not understand this convention.
> 

Your problem has a focus point on my round tuit list.  I supply msys dll 
dependent versions of such things a perl, guile, etc for this very 
reason.  The focus point is set to with or beyond version MSYS-2.0.0 I'm 
afraid.

> To give an idea of what goes on, in the bootstrap process ECL needs to load a
> bunch of files that it locates using @srcdir@. Even though I initially set to
> a valid windows path, d:/msys/1.0/home/user1/ecl, in my Makefile.in it
> appears as /home/user1/ecl, and when ECL tries to
> fopen("@srcdir@/boot.lisp"), it fails.
> 

You say that you explicitly use an absolute win32 path and MSYS is 
converting it to posix?  Which version of MSYS?  Can you provide a small 
test case?

> Is there a standard tool which converts MSYS paths into windows ones? What is
> the name of this tool? Or do I have to link my program against the MSYS DLL
> so that fopen() learns about MSYS paths? If so, how do I do it and how should
> I distribute the resulting executable?
> 

Well, that is what MSYS is about, convert to win32 paths where 
appropriate, so no external tool should be needed.  I want to work with 
you on getting this resolved.

A possible work around would be to use a macro instead for you boot.lisp 
path.  So that you have ``fopen(BOOT_LISP)'' and have the a 
-DBOOT_LISP="$srcdir/boot.lisp" in the Makefile.  Notice the use of a 
variable instead of the configure replacement of @srcdir@.

Earnie.