RE: [Caml-list] Building MSVC ports: coreutils link conflict

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

Alain Frisch wrote:
> On 07/14/2015 06:28 PM, David Allsopp wrote:
> > As far as I'm aware, when started in the usual way as a login shell,
> > Cygwin's bash will always prefix PATH /usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:$PATH
> > ... so I was surprised to find no mention of this issue in the build
> > instructions - is it simply that everyone who builds the MSVC port
> > just curses at this point, alters their PATH and carries on, or is
> > there an alternate, better way of setting up the build environment?
> 
> FWIW, the way we (=LexiFi) work is that our .bashrc/.bash_profile scripts
> are responsible for setting up the LIB and DIR env variables for MSVC and
> prepending the correct directories in front of the PATH.  (They also
> define aliases to switch between the 32- and 64-bit toolchains.) We don't
> rely on .bat files shipped by Microsoft.  It's true that it had become
> messy to support various versions of Visual Studio and of Windows SDK, but
> we still prefer to know exactly how the environment is set up.

It's good to know that I appear not to have missed anything obvious for doing it "out of the box"! Altering /etc/profile (or whatever) was an option I considered, but if you don't prepend /usr/bin to PATH then one quickly runs into problems with the "alternate" versions of find and sort in %windir%\system32 clogging up other parts of build scripts! At which point it's all messy installation-specific changes (which I realise is fine for what you're doing).

Given that this conflict is only over link.exe - all the other tools in the Microsoft toolchain are sensibly, or at least moderately uniquely, named - would a patch to the compiler (and to flexlink) which searches the various directories in PATH in order and identifies the first link.exe which is actually a Microsoft Linker be welcomed (i.e. merged) - an ML-equivalent to [1], but only used if the linker has been specified given as "link" (i.e. with no directory)? I'm happy to patch it, but only if it would be wanted. I don't see a case for doing it for other commands, but with a conflict in something in coreutils it seems OK to make an exception, at least to me?


David

[1] https://github.com/dra27/opam/blob/windows/check_linker