Mail Archives: cygwin/2004/08/19/15:12:35
On Thu, Aug 19, 2004 at 03:08:57PM -0400, Larry Hall wrote:
>At 11:51 AM 8/19/2004, you wrote:
>>On Aug 19 17:13, Gerrit P. Haase wrote:
>>>Sigh. If I were the god of Cygwin, I would have not created textmode
>>>mounts at all. I cannot see the point why it is neccessary to use it.
>>
>>Full ACK! Unfortunately the genuine gods of Cygwin have left the
>>project already long ago and they probably don't even know anymore what
>>that should have been good for.
>
>Geoffrey Noer, the Cygwin maintainer before Chris and Corinna, felt
>that full compatibility with Windows was a primary goal and POSIX/UNIX
>compatibility was a close second (at least he expressed these views at
>the time he was running the show). This may have been a common vision
>held by others who brought Cygwin mounts into existence. I don't
>remember a time when mounts weren't used in Cygwin (I doubt there was
>such a time ;-) ) but I do recall when binary mounts were not the
>default, so clearly there was a feeling that text mounts were important
>at one time in a very real way. Not that I agree with that view. ;-)
>
>BTW, I'm not bringing this up for any real important reason. It's
>largely trivia but since the topic came up, I thought I'd share my
>recollections.
I think the decision to do things this way probably came from Steve
Chamberlain. I wonder if it was just easier to have text mode mounts
back in the era before there was an emacs or a vi available and you
needed to use notepad or wordpad for editing.
Of course, both have been available since 1995 at least, so that's
probably not it.
There was also at least one major Cygnus customer (Intel) who used to
adamantly demand that text mode work reliably, IIRC.
cgf
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