Re: autoload failure

[Lennart Borgman]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jason Rumney" <address@hidden>
To: "Stefan" <address@hidden>
Cc: <address@hidden>; "Tak Ota" <address@hidden>;
<address@hidden>
Sent: Saturday, October 30, 2004 8:55 PM
Subject: Re: autoload failure


: Stefan <address@hidden> writes:
:
: >> The path "/cygdrive/d/pub/emacs" is not valid on Windows.  It is an
: >> indication that you are using Cygwin make, which the docs explicitly
: >> say to avoid for this reason.
: >
: > I really think it would be more constructive to add a file-name-handler
: > for "/cygdrive/" seeing how common this kind of problem is (it might at
: > least save us some time replying to such email).
:
: Its there already I beleive:
:
: 2001-10-29  Sam Steingold  <address@hidden>
:
: * w32-fns.el (convert-standard-filename): Handle cygwin-specific
: "/cygdrive/LETTER/" pathnames.
:
:
: The problem is that this is happening during bootstrap, when
: w32-fns.el is not loaded yet.

Stefans idea sounded like a very good one to me
- and it probably is since it is already used ;-)

I do not know the limitations here since I have no clear picture of the
bootstrap process yet, but could not w32-fns.el be explicitly loaded on w32?
What we are talking about is maybe only one call in lisp\makefile:

autoloads: loaddefs.el doit
 @echo Directories: $(WINS)
 $(emacs) -l autoload \
  --eval $(ARGQUOTE)(setq find-file-hooks nil \
   find-file-suppress-same-file-warnings t \
   generated-autoload-file \
     $(DQUOTE)$(lisp)/loaddefs.el$(DQUOTE))$(ARGQUOTE) \
  -f batch-update-autoloads $(lisp) $(WINS)

I think that fixing this would make people much less confused when they are
trying to build on w32. And this gives more time to do useful work.

I believe that with a small change in convert-standard-filename we could
also make it possible to use MSYS to build Emacs. (Just look for
"/\\(a-zA-Z\\)/".)

A message from Earnie Boyd (MSYS maintainer?) convinced me that it might be
worth the time to look a bit deeper into the problems with using MSYS so I
did this. I again now believe that MSYS also could be an easy to use build
environment for Emacs. I will come back on this later.

- Lennart