Re: cygwin/xfree86/emacs problems after upgrading

[Igor Pechtchanski <pechtcha at cs dot nyu dot edu>]

On Wed, 4 Feb 2004, Harold L Hunt II wrote:

> Igor,
>
> > This (and the existence of CYGWIN_ROOT in your environment) is an artifact
> > of using startxwin.bat.  Unless you have a default directory for the
> > Cygwin root, you can't use that file OOTB -- you'll have to edit it and
> > replace "\cygwin" with the value of your Cygwin root (in your case,
> > "d:\ProgramFiles\Cygwin".
> >
> >> CYGWIN_ROOT = `\cygwin'
> >
>
> Well, you can always just set CYGWIN_ROOT to \ProgramFiles\Cygwin, with
> no leading drive letter and colon.  I think you probably knew that
> already...  I am still amazed at the number of times I have seen people
> go in and change \cygwin to c:\cygwin when they have problems... even
> after reading my comment immediately above it that describes why doing
> this is not necessary.  Sheesh, I thought it was a quite beautiful trick
> to allow the path to be set correctly no matter what drive the cygwin
> folder is on.  :)
>
> Harold

Yes, it's a neat trick *if* the only thing people changed was the install
drive.  If they change the path, all bets are off.  I'm surprised you
don't actually customize startxwin.bat (and similar files, like
startxdmcp.bat) in a postinstall script (which can run under a Cygwin
shell, and thus know the root of the install).  You could choose a
template value, e.g. "%$CYGWIN_ROOT$%", and replace that with "`cygpath -w
/`" using, say, sed.  If you're interested, I could whip up an example
postinstall script for you in the next week or so.
	Igor
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