4.2 Project: "@file" support

[Mark Mitchell]

DJ Delorie wrote:
>>I'm not sure how I can "fix MinGW"; see above.  Also, if a MinGW 
>>application wants to invoke some other Windows program, the behavior 
>>should be the same as if I compiled that application with Visual C, or 
>>Intel's C compiler, or whatever; if we were using magic to pass 
>>command-line arguments, we'd be breaking things.

> My suggestion is to take the patch you are proposing, and add it
> instead to MinGW's crt0 code.  That way, *ALL* applications built with
> MinGW would support @file on the command line, not just gcc.

But, that would change the behavior for applications that may not want 
that.  That's what I was trying to communicate above.  One of the 
benefits of MinGW is that you can write code that compiles and behaves 
identically with MSVC, ICC, or GCC.  If we did as you suggest, we would 
violate that invariant.

A similar argument would apply to the shell-script stuff that was just 
added to libiberty.  Why not just have MinGW wrap CreateProcess and do 
shebang handling there?  Because only some applications what that 
functionality.

I agree that it would be technically feasible to create a different 
version of MinGW crt0 code that users could optionally select when they 
want @-file behavior in an application.  (Of course, we could do that 
for shebang handling too.)

However, there's demonstrable interest in this feature for GNU/Linux as 
well, from the lists, and for Java on all operating systems.

-- 
Mark Mitchell
CodeSourcery, LLC
mark@codesourcery.com
(916) 791-8304