The major feature I would like to see added comes from a discussion with Eli Zaretskii of the GNU Make team. The idea disables the path translations and uses the paths as are. The caveat to this would be that the /bin, /etc/, etc directories must live in the root of the disk drive. I had created a working model months/years ago but didn't keep up with the changes to 1.0.11. I will create a patch file and upload it here (hopefully sometime in May 2009).
This wiki page is to be used for discussion of this idea. The idea does improve the performance of a package build since the path strings aren't manipulated. One reason I don't like this is because it provides the user with an option to change the behavior of MSYS with an environment variable. It will cause headache in trying to help a user. But the headaches with the non-technical shouldn't stop a good idea from being used by the technical.
