Re: invoking gunzip.exe

[Christopher Faylor]

On Sat, Apr 28, 2007 at 10:55:16AM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 17:51:27 -0500
>> From: address@hidden (Karl Berry)
>> Cc: address@hidden
>> 
>> Eric> I'm not sure what patch Chris Faylor put in his latest cygwin drop of 
>> texinfo 
>> Eric> to fix this improper Windows-ism, but it would be nice to have 
>> upstream:
>> Eric> http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-announce/2007-04/msg00035.html
>> 
>> Eric, thanks for mentioning it.
>> 
>> Chris, can you please send me the patch so I include it in the original
>> Texinfo source?  If you have other Cygwin patches, I'd be glad to
>> incorporate them too.

AFAICT, I never got the original email asking for this patch so I'm
replying to this message.

>One way of fixing this that should satisfy all DOS/Windows
>environments without any need for extensive #ifdef'ing is to use
>"gzip.exe -d" instead of "gunzip.exe".

I agree that using -d in this fashion makes sense but adding a .exe to
the end doesn't really help the Cygwin environment.  I don't understand
(but don't really have to understand) the rationale for including it in
a Windows environment.  Nevertheless, the explicit use of .exe only
confuses matters on Cygwin.

>(FWIW, I don't really understand this drive to reimplement Posix
>utilities as shell scripts.  What exactly was wrong with gunzip,
>fgrep, etc. being programs?)

I don't understand that either.  Was this described in some official
FSF communication somewhere?

cgf
--- lib/system.h.orig   2004-04-26 09:56:57.000000000 -0400
+++ lib/system.h        2007-04-24 09:15:14.417656849 -0400
@@ -219,9 +219,14 @@
 # ifdef __CYGWIN__
 #  define DEFAULT_TMPDIR       "/tmp/"
 #  define PATH_SEP     ":"
+#  define STRIP_DOT_EXE        0
+#  undef NULL_DEVICE
+#  define NULL_DEVICE "/dev/null"
+#  define PIPE_USE_FORK        1
 # else  /* O_BINARY && !__CYGWIN__ */
 #  define DEFAULT_TMPDIR       "c:/"
 #  define PATH_SEP     ";"
+#  define STRIP_DOT_EXE        1
 # endif /* O_BINARY && !__CYGWIN__ */
   /* Back to any O_BINARY system.  */
 # define FILENAME_CMP  strcasecmp
@@ -233,7 +238,6 @@
 # define IS_ABSOLUTE(n)        (IS_SLASH((n)[0]) || ((n)[0] && (n)[1] == ':'))
 # define PIPE_USE_FORK 0
 # define SET_BINARY(f)  do {if (!isatty(f)) setmode(f,O_BINARY);} while(0)
-# define STRIP_DOT_EXE 1
 
 #else  /* not O_BINARY, i.e., Unix */
 # define SET_BINARY(f) (void)0