RE: [Caml-list] Need help installing OCaml-Cygwin packages!

[David Allsopp <dra-news@metastack.com>]

Jonathan Protzenko wrote:
> > But I haven't understood why Protz' OCaml uses '\', since when I'm
> > inside cmd.exe, the windows terminal, using '/' works just fine, but
> > using '\' inside Cygwin's terminal just clashes...
> If you have specific instances of a "\" that would be better turned into a
> "/", I can take a look. I think I just did whatever seemed easiest at the
> time. I'm using the stock OCaml sources, meaning I didn't change anything
> in OCaml's Makefile, so some "\" might originate from there.

Personally, I wouldn't go changing working ones from "\" to "/" - for the most part, programs which use "/" as the directory separator on Windows make it quite clear that they weren't written for Windows (and so cast doubt on their quality - if a program is written using properly portable name manipulation, the directory separator is not hard coded - for example in OCaml, see Filename). It's not relevant now, because the versions of Windows have expired, but older command shells could not consistently use / as a separator (try cd /WINNT on Windows 2000...).

Cygwin programs accept / as a Windows PATH separator for pretty much the same reason as Windows (or historically DOS) uses \ - because it didn't interfere with the command line parsing already in place (DOS had command line switches prefixed with "/" before it had directories). The forward slash is therefore used in the build system (as that's Cygwin) but the output should really use backslashes - for example, both %OCAMLLIB% and %OCAMLLIB%\ld.conf in OCaml accept PATHs written that way.


David