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Re: .exe magic
Eric Blake wrote:
Interesting thought. But it is more than just cygwin 1.7.0 that would have to
be changed; we would also need a new release of gcc that no longer added an
automatic .exe to files as they are compiled. And there might be some severe
repurcussions in automake/autoconf where they currently are coded to handle
$(EXEEXT) all over the place, if they do it based on hostname rather than on
what the default gcc output is. I would have to remove some of the .exe magic
I've added in coreutils (but it would mean I'm closer to an upstream image).
Um, some people actually launch cygwin tools from outside a shell, via
shortcuts. Like, say, rxvt, or run, or bash. I think the windows
subsystem still requires known extensions in order to start new
processes (%PATHEXT%=.COM;.EXE;.BAT;.CMD;.VBS;.VBE;.JS;.JSE;.WSF;.WSH)
And even if that were not a problem, I still suspect that making a
drastic change like that will have many far-reaching, non-obvious, and
deleterious effects. Here's one of the top of my head (and not nearly
the most significant): right now cygwin and mingw benefit from each
other; there is a lot of cross-pollination in the ports of various
packages to "windows" that we get to leverage. Making a change like
this would IMO have a net negative effect on this kind of resource
multiplication we currently benefit from.
The current .exe behavior has benefited from many years of tweaking and
fine-tuning, across many different packages (cygwin, gcc, gdb, binutils,
automake, autoconf, libtool, bash, coreutils, ...) to work together to
give the current, mostly coherent, least-surprise behavior we enjoy
today. I strongly caution against making a drastic change like this at
all, and ESPECIALLY against changing the default behavior of tools like
gcc, bash, and coreutils.
--
Chuck
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