filepath mangling under Windows?

[Malcolm Wallace]

> > > ghc-5.02.2 is not a cygwin application,
> > 
> > Whilst I was aware that GHC no longer requires Cygwin to run,
> > I didn't realise that it actively discourages use under Cygwin.
>
> Don't know where you get this "actively discouraging" bit from.

I'm sorry, I just meant that it seems to be a little bit more
difficult now to get GHC and Cygwin to interoperate than it once was.
The situation as I understand it is this:

    * A user has Cygwin as a preferred environment under Windows.
    * This user has D:\ mounted in Cygwin as /d/.
    * Most of the user's applications are found in the path /d/.
    * But a pre-built GHC does not understand the /d/ paths.
    * The user has tried changing their Cygwin environment to use
      D:\ instead of /d/.
    * Now GHC understands paths properly, but most of his other
      applications now do not work because of the opposite path issue.

What I'm wondering is whether the difficulty is a necessary one, or
if it was unintentional, is there an easy fix?  From your suggestions,
I guess there isn't an easy fix.

> You make it sound as if it isn't possible, which certainly isn't the
> case - you just have to keep in mind that using filepaths that only
> makes sense wrt. the Cygwin mount table is not a Good Idea,
> i.e., stuff like /cygdrive/d/foo. (Have a look at the 'cygpath' utility,
> btw).

I have already suggested `cygpath' to the user, which is rather ugly
but does at least work.  One issue for me however, as a distributor
of Haskell software, is that I don't want to pollute the installation
Makefiles with lots of `cygpath' stuff that is only applicable to
one platform.  Maybe I can find a relatively painless way to propagate
the cygpath calls through a Makefile hierarchy at configure time.

> If you're really that gung-ho about cygwin, you could always compile
> up GHC using the cygwin toolchain.

I avoid Windows altogether myself, but I'll suggest it to the user
who had the original complaint.

Regards,
    Malcolm