On Wed, 4 Mar 2020, Sven Schreiber wrote:
 Am 04.03.2020 um 02:29 schrieb Allin Cottrell:
> On Tue, 3 Mar 2020, Sven Schreiber wrote:
 ...
\src\build\addons\SVAR\./../../gretl-git/addons/SVAR\../../../gretl-git/addons/SVAR/SVAR_boot.inp
>> Windows says: Das System kann die angegebene Datei nicht finden.
>> 
>> (= cannot find the given file)
>> But AFAICT the file is there alright. Any ideas?
> 
> Apart from the path being a horrible mash-up?
 Well, I don't really understand this first part with the single dot
 myself:  ___addons\SVAR\./../../gretl___
 while the second part should be OK: ___addons/SVAR\../../../gretl__
 But the thing is that there are many other files in addons/SVAR, not
 just SVAR_boot.inp, and it seems to work with (some of) them. Plus other
 addons have the same file layout and I've verified that some of them got
 built alright. That's why I'm puzzled. 
Fair enough. I tried today on Windows 10 and (somehow or other) the 
SVAR addon built OK. But "extra" failed: after thinking about it I 
see why, and maybe the issue you saw with SVAR is similar.
For building gretl outside of the source tree (recommended) we've 
been symlinking certain files we need from the source tree into the 
out-of-source directory (for example, the ".spec" files for addons). 
This works fine on *nix, but MS Windows doesn't do symlinks. So when 
MSYS encounters an instruction to create a symlink, it just copies 
the file in question to the "make a link here" location.
Perhaps you can see what's coming: a proper symlink will always 
point to the current file in the source tree, but a physical copy, 
as on Windows, will go stale whenever the source file is updated!
What's needed, then, to support building on Windows, is a wholesale 
conversion in the addons Makefiles from "If the file doesn't exist 
at the required location, symlink it" to "if the file doesn't exist 
OR is older than the file it's supposed to be a link to, symlink 
it". This is a PITA but I've started work on it.
Allin