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Re: 1.7.2?


On 3/3/2010 4:21 AM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
On Mar 3 03:39, Larry Hall (Cygwin Developers) wrote:
On 3/2/2010 4:33 PM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:

[... full quote stripped...]


That would break strip and in turn also install -s if $(EXEEXT) is
missing in a Makefile.  And on the commandline.  Sigh.  That was one
of the common scenarios I hoped to fix by this.

OK, here's a heretical question - Do we need to add '.exe' anymore? I know, 'cmd' still wants executable files with that extension (which I'll admit may be _the_ reason to keep it) but is there anything else that really needs it?

Not so heretical. No, Cygwin doesn't need the .exe suffix and it never needed one running on Windows NT. As for 95/98/Me, that's history, fortunately. Yes, we could go forward without .exe suffixes as far as Cygwin is concerned, but there's a problem.

At one point you must start a Cygwin application for the first time,
either by starting it right from Windows Explorer, or by starting a
batch file (Cygwin.bat).  None of that works anymore since neither
Explorer nor cmd will recognize the Cygwin binary as executable.

Probably worse than that is it would break compatibility with Windows insofar as people trying to use the tools from the command prompt, similar to the reported problems with symbolic links. The only solution I can see there is to have wrapper batch files or copies of the executables as exes in another directory for Windows consumption but I don't like the maintainability aspects of that, at least not for the full suite of executables. It's always been a dream of mine to remove these pesky extensions and it would certainly be a nice way to side-step the problem at hand. However I've never found a nice solution to the interoperability problem. And all this diverts enough from the main point of this thread to be considered "off-topic". Perhaps another time. :-)

--
Larry


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