Re: [Caml-list] ocamlbuild on Windows and bash vs. cmd

[Kakadu <kakadu.hafanana@gmail.com>]

Will the powershell be more convenient?

Happy hacking,
Kakadu

On Thu, Oct 6, 2016 at 4:38 PM, Soegtrop, Michael
<michael.soegtrop@intel.com> wrote:
> Dear OCaml users and developers,
>
>
>
> I looked into the fact that ocamlbuild requires bash/cygwin to run. Actually
> it does very little use of bash and I think cmd + ln + rm would work quite
> well.
>
>
>
> From comments in various list I understood that people had issues with
> escaping for cmd. I agree that this is a bit nasty, but not rocket science
> either. I guess the main issue is that for cmd not only space and tab are
> command argument separators, but also equal (=), comma (,) and semicolon
> (;). So for cmd a=b,c;d is the same as a b c d which is the same as a , = ,
> b =;= c==d. Essentially cmd treats unquoted pieces as sed ‘s/[\t =,;]+/ /g’.
> If a name contains any of these characters, one has to quote it for cmd, but
> not for bash. Since = and , are not that uncommon in file names, I guess
> this resulted in issues.
>
>
>
> BUT cmd splits the command line only into command names, complete argument
> lists and file names for redirection. That is if you call e.g. ocamlc, cmd
> just replaces shell variables and extracts the executable name, but does not
> split up the argument list into individual pieces. bash on Windows does this
> neither, because (afaik) Windows has at the lowest level no mechanism to
> pass individual arguments to an executable. The command gets a string and
> splitting this string and even globing is the business of the executable. So
> it is rather odd that this behaves substantially different for bash and for
> cmd. The only thing which needs to be quoted properly are command names and
> file names of redirections.
>
>
>
> There might be issue with shell special characters. There are those which
> are not allowed in file names “\/:*?<>| and those allowed in filenames &().
> I guess those not allowed in filenames don’t need any special treatment,
> since one can’t do that much with them except their special shell use. The
> other 3 one should be escape with ^. There is no way to quote shell special
> characters with cmd – they must be escaped with ^.
>
>
>
> The only real issue is that some people seem to use build rules with “real”
> bash stuff in it – well if you do this I guess you anyway have a cygwin
> around.
>
>
>
> So I wonder if it would be appreciated by the community to have an
> ocamlbuild (e.g. as a configure option) which uses cmd instead of bash. I
> think if one does the escaping properly, this should be good for the large
> majority of projects out there.
>
>
>
> Ocamlc seems to run fine without cygwin, but I didn’t test other tools like
> ocamllex or menhir as yet. Are there known issues?
>
>
>
> Best regards,
>
>
>
> Michael
>
>
>
>
>
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