Re: non-unix help needed: valid filename characters?

[Howard Chu <hyc@symas.com>]

Hallvard B Furuseth wrote:
> I wrote:
> > > ldap_config.h just tests for _WIN32 and defines LDAP_DIRSEP. There is
> > > no reason to do anything beyond that. Cygwin does its own machinations
> > > already and we don't know or care what they are.
> > So MingW and Cygwin translate filenames with "forbidden characters"
> > like \ to something which works on Windows?
>
> Sorry, getting tired... I presume this falls under your previous reply,
>    "Building OpenLDAP as a Cygwin app is not recommended and I see no
>    reason to make any special effort to support it."
>
> It'd be easier if I knew Windows so I knew something about what I was
> talking about...

MinGW is only a programming toolkit that exposes the Win32 API to the GNU 
toolchain. As such, any code you develop with MinGW is a plain old native 
Win32 app; there are no special "MinGW" APIs.

Cygwin is a DLL that emulates Unix system calls, plus an environment built 
around that DLL. The emulation layer it provides has a pretty high resource 
cost, and Cygwin apps cannot easily be manipulated using regular Windows 
tools. Performance-wise I've found developing in Cygwin to be at least 3x 
slower than with native Windows, and as such I avoid it as much as possible.

There's also MSYS, which is a programming environment (forked from an old 
version of Cygwin) aimed at enabling MinGW development using standard Unix 
shells and tools. This is what I use for working on Win32 OpenLDAP.
--
  -- Howard Chu
  CTO, Symas Corp.           http://www.symas.com
  Director, Highland Sun     http://highlandsun.com/hyc/
  Chief Architect, OpenLDAP  http://www.openldap.org/project/