On Feb 11 15:24, Stephan Mueller wrote: > cgf wrote: > " So, I don't think this really answers Corinna's question. I believe that > " she was looking for documentation which stated that ;; was ignored, not > " reasoning which implies it. > > In the absence of the former, I'd hope the latter would be better than > nothing. > I'd also consider that the text from PATH ? counts as documentation, and > conclusions drawn from the results of doing exactly what it says to be worth > something.
It's interesting but the real conclusion drawn from that is still by guessing. I'm still curious if there exists some piece of description from Microsoft as to how empty paths in %PATH% are handled. > Right now, sloppy Windows paths with ;; happen to result in dot getting added > to Cygwin paths, as you say. This leads to Windows users with sloppy paths > having their expectations being met but in a roundabout, somewhat arbitrary > way. I won't speculate on how many people have problems with ;;. What I > do think is that translating ;; as empty and explicitly prepending . is > straightforward, faithful to Windows users expectations and more > deterministic, > since it doesn't rely on the side effects of sloppy installers. > > However, as is often the case where backwards compatibility is paramount, > doing nothing is a fine approach too. Me, I have my dots in my paths where > I want them, and don't have a sloppy Windows path anywhere. > > " Also, while skipping empty elements is a trivial operation, it is not > " without cost. Every time that we have to guard the user against > " something like this, we add another nail to the "cygwin is slow" coffin. > > Performance matters, but I hesitate to invoke it against correctness. That > is, > if there were consensus that skipping empty elements is the right answer, then > I'd hope that Cygwin would skip empty elements, even if it is an extra if and > a few more cycles in a common code path. If there's no consensus on skipping > empty elements, and absolutely everything else is equal, then sure, go with > what's faster. Thanks, Corinna -- Corinna Vinschen Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to Cygwin Project Co-Leader cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Red Hat -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
