Fwd: WINDOWS_NATIVE_COMPILE_ENVIRONMENT is wrong with 32-bit cygwin -SOLVED

[Robin & Di Hayman]

Simply put, there was a bad PATH to cygpath.exe

I think this is what was happening ...

During the first pass of a build after clean, the system PATH at that 
time is saved in
         home/build/windows_tools.properties
  as WINDOWS_VS_PATH.

On subsequent builds, setupTools() sees that windows_tools.properties 
exists, so uses it.  Then WINDOWS_VS_PATH is updated in win.gradle 
setupTools() to merge the current path. However, what is in 
windows_tools.properties, in my case a bad c:\cygwin64\bin 'wins' over 
c:\cygwin\bin which is in the correct current path.

I didn't puzzle how this can happen exactly. I would have expected to 
see both c:\cygwin64\bin and c:\cygwin\bin in the new WINDOWS_VS_PATH.

Subsequently, WINDOWS_VS_PATH replaces its old value in 
WINDOWS_NATIVE_COMPILE_ENVIRONMENT.  And hence my problem, 
make-shell-cygpath could not find cygpath.exe.

My quick fix was to delete [home]/build/windows_tools.properties and 
then things started to work much better.

The origin of the problem was that I had at one time installed cygwin64, 
but I later replaced it with cygwin32 and the old location got stuck in 
windows_tools.properties.

If I had been smarter, I would have just done gradle clean after 
changing the tools!

Robin