The problem which was recently reported in the cygwin list where
good-old "GetCommandLine" no longer works (as invoked prior to calling
WinMain) is due to changes that Corinna made to spawn_guts. She made it
so that if cygwin detects that a to-be-execed process is a cygwin
process it does not fill out the windows command line.
I had resisted making this optimization, probably for exactly the case
of GetCommandLine, but, now that it's there, I am loath to change it. I
like the idea of spawn_guts not going to the effort of creating a
windows command line when it knows it shouldn't have to.
I don't know why the original creators of Cygwin decided that they had
to implement WinMain handling when they were trying to create a system
that built GNU tools that didn't use WinMain, but, regardless, I am
thinking that maybe we should deprecate WinMain, GetCommandLine, and
GetEnvironmentVariable and friends. I think that there probably aren't
very many programs out there which use these.
What we could do is export versions of these in libcygwin.a (not
necessarily in cygwin1.dll). A Cygwin version of GetCommandLine[AW]
would concatenate the contents of __argv and return a string.
GetEnvironentVariable could do the same thing.
This is a radical departure from our previously stated goal of "newer
cygwin's always work" but, frankly, I'm getting very tired of hearing
how slow cygwin is (read the git mailing list sometime) and I am even
more tired of making accommodations which slow things down for people
who are using Cygwin in ways that aren't in line with it's stated goals.
Does anyone think that requiring people to relink their apps if they
want to use these Windows-isms is a very bad idea? FWIW, I discovered a
way around the problem that Corinna was fixing with her spawn_guts
changes and Corinna has a patch waiting in the wings to implement it
but... I'd rather not go with the patch. I'd like cygwin programs to
just not worry about the windows command line (or windows environment
variables) at all.