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Date:	Tue, 16 Jul 2002 18:33:54 -0700
To:	Jon Cast <jcast AT ou DOT edu>, cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
From:	Randall R Schulz <rrschulz AT cris DOT com>
Subject:	Re: gzip.exe as symlink breaks NTEmacs's jka-compr.el
In-Reply-To:	<200207170118.g6H1IQS28105@d-ip-129-15-78-125.cs.ou.edu>
References:	<Message from Randall R Schulz <rrschulz AT cris DOT com>
	<5 DOT 1 DOT 0 DOT 14 DOT 2 DOT 20020716083826 DOT 01f845a0 AT pop3 DOT cris DOT com>
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Jon,

I'm impressed by Emacs and I think Lisp is a fantastic programming 
language--one which I've had the pleasure to use. And I wish I knew how to 
use Emacs, but alas, I'm a humble Vi user.

However, I believe that if there's a conceit being displayed here, it's 
yours. You seem to think that because a Cygwin command comes within the 
realm of all that Emacs surveys, the Cygwin tool should adapt to service 
Emacs. If Emacs does not work well in the environment in which it finds 
itself, is it the fault of that environment? I think not.

As has often been said here (by the principals, not me): Cygwin is not Unix.

Randall Schulz
Mountain View, CA USA


At 18:18 2002-07-16, you wrote:
>Randall R Schulz <rrschulz AT cris DOT com> wrote:
><snip>
> > I may have missed something (please forgive me for not re-reading
> > the thread), but why is a non-Cygwin program (NTEmacs) relying on a
> > Cygwin tool?
>
>Because Emacs is a Unix program.  It's been evolved to deliver very
>nearly to full power of the Unix environment, and as such uses /many/
>Unix tools.  Many of those tools are not easily available on Windows,
>but if Emacs finds a copy of them, it'll use them anyway.  This is a
>feature, not a bug.
>
> > Surely it can be configured to use the correct one, right?
>
>If there's a Windows gzip installed, you can customize Emacs to use
>it.  But why install two gzips?
>
> > If NTEmacs doesn't include it's own gzip / gunzip, then editing a
> > compressed file wouldn't even be possible without Cygwin installed,
>
>s/Cygwin/gzip/.  Of course you can't edit
>
> > so it seems incumbent upon NTEmacs to deal with the challenges of
> > doing so in their most generic form.
>
>Why does Emacs have to work around this conceit that all the world
>should be a Cygwin program, when /making gzip work from Emacs/ is so
>much easier?  Consider: Cygwin is a Unix emulation environment, right?
>So if every program was a Cygwin program, every program would be a
>Unix program, and we could all use Unix.  Cygwin exists because some
>people have to use Windows programs.  Ergo, Cygwin cannot pretend
>Windows programs do not exist.
>
> > There is, for example, the "readlink" command that resolves a Cygwin
> > symbolic link.
>
> > Randall Schulz
> > Mountain View, CA USA
>
>Jon Cast


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