MSYS build - stage 2 problem

[Simon Marlow]

> Simon Peyton-Jones (simonpj at microsoft.com) wrote:
> 
> >>  Besides, that MSYS build is faster & simpler, I'd say 
> that switching to
> >>  MSYS (for Win32) platfrom) could also mean: cleaner.
> > 
> > Would you care to say why cleaner?
> 
> Getting rid of constructs to handle path conversions from 
> POSIX to Win e.g.
> cygpath, sed ..

I'm not convinced about that.

  - MSYS has its own strange pathname convention (/c/foo instead
    of c:/foo) and it does magic conversion in the shell(?).  I'm 
    not convinced that paths of the form /c/foo can't leak into
    our tools anywhere, and I'm not convinced that MSYS's magic
    conversion isn't going to cause any problems.

  - both MSYS and cygwin handle Win32 native paths, with both
    / and \ as directory separators.  In the GHC build system we
    use these native paths exclusively, so there's no difference
    between MSYS and cygwin here.  The only place where cygpath
    shows up is in the configure script, and I believe we need to
    do something equivalent for MSYS here too.

Having said that, MSYS still looks like an improvement over cygwin for
our purposes.

Cheers,
	Simon