I would prefer if the patch was integrated into Gambit.  My only worry is the use of cygpath here:

case "$target_os" in
    mingw*) # set gambitdir to use a native windows path
      GAMBITDIR=`cygpath -d $prefix  | tr '\\' '/'`
    *) # otherwise just use the prefix
      GAMBITDIR=$prefix
esac

cygpath doesn’t exist in mingw/msys.  It only exists if cygwin is installed but the case selects “mingw*” which seems wrong.

Marc



> On Mar 23, 2017, at 9:23 PM, Bill Six <billsix@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> By the way, I don't mind maintaining this patch outside of Gambit, just thought I'd share it here in the case that it's useful.
>
> For context, I'm looking to get updated Gambit versions into package managers, for ease of installation/upgrades.  I updated Gambit to 4.8.8 in Gentoo Linux. https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/commit/dev-scheme/gambit?id=bd6727aa850ed00d5c16c448a7a50114b55b86b1
>
> I'm now looking to add a new Gambit package to MSys2 (http://www.msys2.org/), a fork of cygwin, built on Arch Linux's "pacman" manager.  A few months ago, I had issues with using "./configure --prefix=$FOO", because with msys2,  "$FOO" had to be in the "unix" format (e.g. /usr), but Gambit needs "$FOO"  to be a path in native Windows format, as file I/O on that path uses native windows routines http://webmail.iro.umontreal.ca/pipermail/gambit-list/2016-October/008413.html
>
> So my patch, on _any_ mingw system (which might be too broad), changes to ___GAMBITDIR variable to a native windows path, with forward slashes instead of backslashes, while not effecting the --prefix variable at all
>
> I plan to get a build of gambit 4.8.8 with my patch into MSys2 somewhat soon.  If my patch is useful to you, great, if not, I'll make a patch as part of the MSys2 build of Gambit.
>
> Thanks,
> Bill
>
>
> On Thu, Mar 23, 2017 at 8:48 PM, Marc Feeley <feeley@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
> Can you explain what this does?  I don’t like relying on “cygpath” which I don’t think exists on plain msys.
>
> Marc
>
>
>
> > On Mar 23, 2017, at 8:42 PM, Bill Six <billsix@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Marc,
> >
> > I patched configure.ac so that Gambit builds and works correctly on msys2 on windows.
> >
> > Bill
> > <0001-build-on-msys2-windows-by-using-the-native-windows-p.patch>_______________________________________________
> > Gambit-list mailing list
> > Gambit-list@iro.umontreal.ca
> > https://webmail.iro.umontreal.ca/mailman/listinfo/gambit-list
>
>