Subject: Re: Picking up include directories automatically
From: [email-masked] (Jason Zions)

23 May 1997 10:27:46 -0700
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Mikey wrote:
> The few programs that I've worked with that did their own path handleing
> under linux "handled" // by assuming that they were dupes, and stripping
> them out whenever they found them, begining middle or end, and since those
> programs were being compiled on a platform that "aims" for posix compliance,
> I  ASS U MEd that // isn't posix, but under gnu-win32, it dosen't work
> correctly for all programs, so DON'T USE IT.

Nope; just bad programming. // is explicitly reserve in POSIX
*precisely* to allow it to be used for things like drive letters
(//C/whatever) or hostnames (Apollo Computer's DomainOS used
//hostname/path to treat an entire network of systems like a single
giant filesystem). Conforming applications should leave a leading //
alone; 1003.1 is very clear on this. Three or more slashes can be
collapsed to a single slash.

The only question that cygwin needs to decide is if it wants to expose
the DOS drive letter forest-of-trees *at all*. Might be smartest to
simply stick with a single tree whose root is some directory on some
drive; with a solid mount model and symbolic links, you can glue the
thing together however you'd like. Personally, I would mount the root
directories of the individual DOS drives under something like /drives
and drop symbolic links elsewhere. (Perhaps I'm making a rash
assumption; does cygwin support symlinks?)

Jason

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