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

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

It's a while since I've last needed to build the MSVC port of OCaml, but
this issue rang some vague bells in my memory of it.

The Microsoft Linker is called link.exe which, annoyingly, is also the name
of a coreutils utility. When building OCaml (from bash, therefore), if
/usr/bin is in PATH before the Microsoft C Compiler's Bin directory, OCaml
will attempt to use the wrong link and choke.

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?


David