770165 - Pymake and GNU make have different inter-path separators on Windows

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox Build System :: General, defect)

Description

[Rain [:rain1] (inactive)]

Attachment: workaround/fix

For inter-path separators (the : in PATH=/bin:/usr/bin) Pymake uses the Windows standard semicolon (;) while GNU make uses the Unix standard colon (:). This means vpath-directive.mk currently fails with GNU make but succeeds with pymake.

I've attached a patch that makes the test pass, but that doesn't seem to be the right thing to do. (Or is it?)

Two questions:
1. Can this be fixed at all?
2. Should this be fixed?

Comment 1

[Benjamin Smedberg]

It would be helpful if these patches could be against the pymake repository itself instead of the mozilla repo.

It is the correct behavior for VPATH to use the ; separator on Windows, because pymake operates on native paths, while msys make on windows operates on msys paths. So changing the test is probably the correct answer. This is one of the fundamental differences between pymake and msys make. I don't think that this is a problem if we're comparing against mingw32-make, though, which also operates on windows-style paths.

Comment 2

[Rain [:rain1] (inactive)]

> So changing the test is probably the correct answer.

Yes, that's what I first thought, but don't relative paths make this a bit murkier? So far I think we've been cheating our way into successfully building on Windows with Pymake by only using relative paths.

Comment 3

[Mike Hommey [:glandium]]

(In reply to Benjamin Smedberg  [:bsmedberg] from comment #1)
> pymake operates on native paths, while msys make on windows operates
> on msys paths.

Note that's what makes building nss with pymake really hard.

Comment 4

[Rain [:rain1] (inactive)]

Attachment: patch

per bsmedberg's recommendation.

Comment 5

[Rain [:rain1] (inactive)]

http://hg.mozilla.org/users/bsmedberg_mozilla.com/pymake/rev/e4249836c21d
http://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/rev/30ad537fca91

Comment 6

[Ed Morley [:emorley]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/30ad537fca91