Simply put, there was a bad PATH to cygpath.exe
I think this is what was happening ...
During the first pass of a build after clean, the system PATH at that
time is saved in
home/build/windows_tools.properties
as WINDOWS_VS_PATH.
On subsequent builds, setupTools() sees that windows_tools.properties
exists, so uses it. Then WINDOWS_VS_PATH is updated in win.gradle
setupTools() to merge the current path. However, what is in
windows_tools.properties, in my case a bad c:\cygwin64\bin 'wins' over
c:\cygwin\bin which is in the correct current path.
I didn't puzzle how this can happen exactly. I would have expected to
see both c:\cygwin64\bin and c:\cygwin\bin in the new WINDOWS_VS_PATH.
Subsequently, WINDOWS_VS_PATH replaces its old value in
WINDOWS_NATIVE_COMPILE_ENVIRONMENT. And hence my problem,
make-shell-cygpath could not find cygpath.exe.
My quick fix was to delete [home]/build/windows_tools.properties and
then things started to work much better.
The origin of the problem was that I had at one time installed cygwin64,
but I later replaced it with cygwin32 and the old location got stuck in
windows_tools.properties.
If I had been smarter, I would have just done gradle clean after
changing the tools!
Robin
