Dealing with random Sybase client on Cygwin problems

For some random reason, all my cygwin software that links with the Sybase client started failing. I determined that when the Sybase dll's were being linked in the SYBASE environment variable is somehow being unset (or ignored) and the default value of c:/sql10 is being used. The tell tale error is:

The context allocation routine failed when it tried to load localization files!! One or more following problems may caused the failure

Your sybase home directory is c:\sql10. Check the environment variable SYBASE if it is not the one you want!
Cannot access file c:\sql10\ini\objectid.dat

I reall have no idea why this is, why it changed or how to fix it. After much searching I decided to use a hacky workaround instead, so here's what I did.

• I made an empty directory c:\sql10
• I copied the directories $SYBASE/locales and $SYBASE/charsets into c:\sql10 (these are static lookup data, so they never change unless you upgrade your client software).
• I created an empty directory c:\sql10\ini
• I added a line to my .bashrc to copy over the up to date ini data:
  rsync -r /cygdrive/c/SYBASE/ini/ /cygdrive/c/sql10/ini/

Pretty bogus but it works.