Mail Archives: cygwin/2003/01/09/18:02:04
On Jan 09, linda w (cyg) wrote:
> > Cygwin targets POSIX compatibility wherever possible. Any
> > discussion about paths that ignores the POSIX standards will
> > need to be reviewed with POSIX in mind. It's easier to do
> > that up front.
> ---
> What were the _original_ design goals of Cygwin -- i.e. as
> sponsored by "RedHat"?
>
> If one claims that the original project pages are irrelevant or not
> appropriate to use as a specification of the project intention, then I'd say
> that Cygwin has been moved off of the original project goals and
> is no longer "the same" project, but something else.
>
> Changing the original goals to suit the aesthetic sensibilities of
> project maintainers is very different from creating a useful compatibility
> layer for RedHat customers to port applications from Linux to the Win32
> environment and use those applications and tools _seamlessly_ with *native*
> Win32 applications. Putting on an 'enterprise' hat, I don't want my Win32 or
> Linux sys admins to have to learn to use separate path syntaxes depending on
> which tool they are using in the Win32 environment. A project goal/feature
> that was listed was the ability to use Win32 tools intermixed with usage of
> Unix [redhat linux] utils.
>
> Under any major, user-oriented version of Unix that I am aware
> of, "//" is reduced to "/" by the *OS*. This is perfectly POSIX compliant
> behavior. The restriction of non-assumptions of "//"=="/" are on _applications_
> that desire to be POSIX compliant -- it is not a restriction on the OS.
That's not a feature of the OS, it's a feature of the filesystem.
The fact that Unix-like OS's *typically* use ext2fs/ffs/etc. as their
primary filesystems, and that MS OS's *typically* use, um, any of
about seven filesystems with a variety of case-sensitivity, maximum-
filename-length, valid characterset, path separator, and directory
structure permutations is orthogonal.
Your sysadmins don't need to learn different path syntaxes for
different *environments*, but they do for different *filesystems*. You
can mount an HPFS filesystem on a Linux box, and you can mount an FFS
filesystem on a Windows box. Either way, you will have to cope.
- Kurt
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