[m-dev.] for review: make vpath_find look for .exe files.

[Fergus Henderson]

On 09-Jun-1999, Tyson Dowd <trd at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> 
> Cygwin b20 reports executables as existing if a file exists with a
> .exe suffix -- for example test -f foo will succeed if foo.exe exists.
> If you try to copy foo, however, cp will fail.
> 
> scripts/vpath_find:
> 	Look for .exe and .EXE files and return them in preference to 
> 	filenames without this suffix.
> 
> 	Although this could conceivable cause problems if both files
> 	exist, this seems very unlikely.

There's already a work-around for this problem -- see README.MS-Windows
and search for "hack_for_windows" in the top-level Mmakefile.

The current work-around is admittedly far from ideal.
For one thing, it requires manual intervention;
but it would be fairly simple to change configure.in
to handle that automatically.

I'm not sure that changing vpath_find is the best approach.
VPATH, and hence vpath_find, is supposed to be used for finding
source files, not for finding executables.

I think it might be better to get autoconf to set some variable
called say $(EXE_SUFFIX), and to then modify the Mmakefiles to
use that variable.  I think the latest version of autoconf
in fact has a builtin macro for doing that.
This approach has the advantage that it could work better with Make,
because Make will know the real filename.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
PGP: finger fjh at 128.250.37.3        |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.
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