Mail Archives: cygwin/1997/12/09/17:56:00
On 09-Dec-1997, Jason Zions <jazz AT opennt DOT com> wrote:
> > I do not understand the needs of text mode at all. Neither NT posix
> > subsystem, nor OpenNT, nor UWIN doesn't have text mode as default.
>
> If I understand the arguments, Sergey, the basic difference is that the
> goals of the NT Posix subsystem, OpenNT, and UWIN are different from the
> goals of cygwin.
>
> The first three are aimed are providing (forgive the simplification and
> trademark abuse) UNIX on top of NT. Users live in a Unix world, where
> there is only one line-ending and \n is its name.
>
> Cygwin has multiple goals; while "Unix on NT" is one of them, it appears
> to be of less importance than the others: a free development environment
> for Win32, a way of getting more tools more rapidly into the Win32
> world, etc. In meeting those goals, supporting the Win32 line-ending of
> \r\n is relatively important. Folks living in the Win32 world don't want
> to give up Win32 tools that operate on text files; because of that, they
> need cygwin to deal properly with \r\n-style text files.
Yes, absolutely.
To give a concrete example: my goal is to provide a port of the Mercury
compiler and development tools to Win32. GNU-win32 is just a means to
that end. Ideally the fact that the Mercury system was originally
written on Unix (making use of Bourne shell scripts, etc.) should be
entirely transparent to the Win32 users of Mercury. They should be
able to use their favourite Win32 text editor, which no doubt puts \r\n
into files, without needing to do anything special.
I don't mind having to use "rb" or "wb" when opening binary files.
Actually our code already does that, but the point is that I'm willing
to invest some additional developer effort solving text-vs-binary hassles
in order to spare our users from win32-vs-unix hassles.
To achieve my goal, I need to use text-mode mounts.
Thus for my purposes, if bash stops working on text-mode mounts,
then this is a big step backwards...
--
Fergus Henderson <fjh AT cs DOT mu DOT oz DOT au> | "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh> | of excellence is a lethal habit"
PGP: finger fjh AT 128 DOT 250 DOT 37 DOT 3 | -- the last words of T. S. Garp.
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