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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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