> Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2005 12:43:21 +0100 > From: Alessandro Vesely <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > CC: Eli Zaretskii <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [email protected] > > The analisys above is not fully correct: NT distinguishes two kinds of > environment, system variables and user variables. Thus, setting a variable > with different case in the other environment still creates two variables > with the same uppercase name. Typically, that occurs when PATH has been set > as a system variable and Path has been added by GNU make as a user variable. > > > >> > > >> This seems crazy to me, coming from my cushy UNIX-centric world :-), > > >> but there are some good arguments here and so if the W32 team thinks > > >> it's a good idea, it's fine with me. > > > > ez> It seems crazy to me as well, especially since I don't understand > > ez> what was the original problem that such case-insensitive treatment > > ez> of environment vars is supposed to solve. Can someone enlighten > > ez> me about the opriginal problem? > > > > From the description above it seems like if the makefile expects a > > variable from the environment called SOMEVARIABLE, but you set > > SomeVariable in your environment, make won't treat them as the same even > > though Windows (and DOS?) apparently DOES consider them the same. > > Add to this that Win32 utilities are often inconsistent about the spelling > of a variable: Since the OS retrieves variables case-insensitivitely, they > feel free to amend the spelling across versions to increase readability.
What specific Make-related problems can happen due to all this mess? I don't think we need to solve academic problems, only the ones that harm Make or its frequent subsidiary programs. > IMHO, a more interesting solution to this problem is to have a getenv > function. ??? Environment variables are just variables in Make, so you already have that. E.g., "foo = $BAR" wil store in foo the value of the environment variable BAR (modulo the -e switch to Make). _______________________________________________ Make-w32 mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/make-w32
