[GRASS-dev] Windows-style Pathnames

[Paul Kelly]

On Wed, 1 Nov 2006, Huidae Cho wrote:

> No.  MSys has a virtual root to wherever it is installed, so /usr/...
> should be transformed to something like c:\msys\1.0\usr\...  I doubt we
> can completely avoid using this convention in winGRASS.

But what I mean is if we avoid using this Msys-specific syntax to start 
with, then there should be no need to transform it into proper Windows 
pathnames. Where are the pathnames that you need to transform to Windows 
syntax being generated from?

>
>> I mean c:\grass\grassdata format is more correct, although as Glynn said
>> c:/grass/grassdata works in a lot of circumstances and means very little in
>> GRASS has to be changed (there are lots of C routines that form pathnames by
>> concatenating strings with /). /c/grass/grassdata is Msys-specific and is
>> specially interpreted by the Msys shell, right? I don't think there should be a
>> need to use that format at all (except see Huidae's comment below).
>>
>>>> Either option will involve a lot of changes. #1 is easier to
>>>> implement, but will probably need to be done in more places (it needs
>>>> to be done for every pathname which might need to be in host syntax at
>>>> some point). #2 is harder, but only needs to be performed in places
>>>> where host syntax is known to be necessary.
>>> I found #2 a better choice becase MSys shell scripts will be happier
>>> with posix path.
>>
>> Using the form c:/grass/grassdata rather than /c/grass/grassdata has proven OK
>> for me so far (mostly in the configure script and bits of shell scripting done
>> in the installation process and Makefiles). Were there many examples where this
>> format was problematic?
>
> One example is $PATH.  '<DRIVE>:' cannot be used in PATH because ':' is
> already used for path separators in the MSys environment.  For example,
> exporting "PATH=c:/grass/bin:c:/msys/bin" in a shell script is
> problematic while setting "PATH=c:/grass/bin;c:/msys/bin" (note ';'
> separator) in a batch file (e.g., c:\msys\1.0\msys.bat) is OK since MSys
> takes care of converting it to PATH=/c/grass/bin:/c/msys/bin.

Good point. Perhaps there is an Msys command that can convert paths to 
Msys format before including them in the PATH?
I feel though that this is a very specific problem with scripts changing 
the PATH and not worth changing the behaviour of the rest of GRASS just 
for it.

> The Windows-style path causes another problem/inconvenience when it
> comes to shell scripting because scripts have to deal with two types of
> path styles in some cases.  For example, it would be complicated to
> implement "which" using $FOO if the script reads in a config file
> directly.  For this reason, I prefer UNIX-style pathnames even if host
> syntax looks more reasonable.

Not sure what you mean about implementing "which" using $FOO?
How big a problem do you think this is? I would hazard a guess that in 
most cases Msys/Unix commands used in scripts will work OK with 
c:/grass/grassdata style paths used throughout. How many scripts set the 
PATH? Are there standard Msys functions or commands for converting a path 
between formats that we could use in some way?

Paul