Mail Archives: cygwin-developers/1999/01/21/19:21:23
On Thu, Jan 21, 1999, Christopher Faylor wrote:
[...]
> Just to complicate matters, however, it seems to me that with Geoff's
> recent changes to mount, you can actually change the way the default
> happens. With his changes there will now be a user-selectable method
> for referring to a Windows drive: /cygdrive/a/foo, where /cygdrive
> is selectable.
>
> I think it is very likely that if you choose /cygdrive to be binmode
> then your default drives will be binmode also.
>
> Is this correct, Geoff?
I'm cc'ing cygwin32-developers to get their input and to let people
know where things are with respect to the mount changes I've been
making recently. (Half of which are in the Jan 17 snapshot; the rest
will appear soon).
* //<drive-letter>/ no longer works
* The mount table format used has changed. Now mounts are stored in
subkeys named after the POSIX path name, with the other information
stored as various fields in each mount key.
* mount/umount can now deal with mounts in both the user and system
registry areas.
* It is allowed to have two duplicate mount points at a single
POSIX path but if and only if one is in the user area and one is in
the system area.
* User mounts always take precedence over system mounts.
* When a Cygwin program refers to an unknown drive letter that's not
already in the mount table somewhere, Cygwin creates an automount
under a default path (which defaults to /cygdrive). Cygwin only
generates automounts when doing translations from Win32 to POSIX and
not the other way around. This means that if you cd into Z:/foo/bar
and do a "pwd", Cygwin will generate a POSIX path of /cygdrive/z and
from then on, /cygdrive/z would be a valid mount you could use to
get at that drive letter. But you couldn't cd into /cygdrive/z and
expect to get anything other than an unknown path error if Z: wasn't
already mounted.
* The default automount path root of "/cygdrive" can be set with the
mount utility, and is a piece of the per-user registry mount info.
* Currently all auto-mounted mounts are in text mode.
The biggest thing that needs to be done is to provide an upgrade
path from the old mount table layout to the new one. This will most
likely be done with some combination of an upgrade flag in mount and
possibly an upgrade method contained in the Cygwin DLL. I haven't
ironed out the details yet.
That all said, I'd love to hear your opinions about all this, and
how automounts should behave with respect to text vs. binmode should
affect the automounts (the question Pierre asked me in conjunction
with his helping write better Cygwin documentation).
Perhaps the CYGWIN environment variable should determine the mode of
automounts?
--
Geoffrey Noer
noer AT cygnus DOT com
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