Subject: Re: Bug in od, cat, etc reading binary files
From: [email-masked]

29 Sep 1997 07:45:37 -0700
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked], [email-masked]

My question:
>I have to agree with the original poster on this.  What good is the cygwin32
>API on NT if it is not compatible with the rest of NT?  If you are going to
>only use programs running in the cygwin32 world, then why not just run Linux
>instead and get better performance and better compatibility?  If you're
>running NT, it seems that you likely need it to run some other things that
>only run on NT, so if cygwin32 is to be useful, it should also be able to
>deal with files produced by or intended for these other programs.

Larry Hall's response:

}I don't think anyone will argue that having at least an option to get full
}Windows platform compatibility is a desirable thing.  However, your 
}implication that cygwin32 (or gnu-win32) is not useful without this option
}is a bit too broad.  For the general reason that cygwin32 allows 
}traditionally UNIX based programs to be ported quickly and easily to Windows
}platforms, cygwin32 is useful to many people in many areas.  Tossing this
}fact aside is close to insulting to all who create and work on cygwin32 and
}those who have and are currently using it.

I am sorry if I have given this impression to anybody.  I believe that the
cygwin development is very good and fully support it (in principal, and in
bug fixes).

However, I think that it is important that the aim of the project be set
at some point so that people know where things are heading.  Currently, it
looks to me that cygwin is trying to create its own isolated pocket of Unix
like behaviour on top of a win32 environment.  Now this is fine for the
intelectual challenge and all, but is this of any real use otherwise?  It
seems to me that if you want a Unix environment and don't care about
interacting with the rest of the NT/W95 environment, then why not just run
Linux and get a real Unix environment that will run faster and have less
compatibility problems?  If you are running NT/W95, you must be doing this
for some reason, right?  Probably that there are things that run in this
environment that are important as well as the Unix programs ported to the
cygwin world.  If they are both important, shouldn't they be able to
communicate with each other?

It seems that the thing that causes the most problems communicating with
each other is the wholesale mounting of filesystems in binary mode.  This
cures some big problems in the Unix view of processes in the cygwin world,
but makes it totally impossible to share text files between the cygwin
world and the rest of the NT/W95 world.  This is what is causing the
greatest separation of the two worlds that I see.  It's certainly not an
easy problem to solve, but I think that the wholesale "just mount everything
as binary" probably isn't really the right solution.

}  If Windows compatibility is 
}what you need from a development environment, I suggest you use for now
}ming32 or other commercial environments.

In fact, this is pretty much what I am doing, but I am actually interested
in cross compiling from a Solaris machine for an NT target.

}... If this one doesn't serve your purpose at the moment, try a different
}one or make your own.

As a basically ming32 type user, it may be totally out of place of me to
comment on the cygwin environment's development direction.  I was echoing
another user's statement that things would be more useful if they conformed
to the NT/W95 environment's standards for what a text file looks like.
Otherwise, it seems to me that you get a Unix world on an NT/W95 box that
can't talk to anything else on the NT/W95 box.  Maybe things aren't really
that isolated, though.  If all of the cygwin mount points are binary, what
useful interaction is there between cygwin and NT/W95?  If there is none,
what advantage is there in running cygwin on NT/W95 over running Linux?
If there isn't some good answer to these questions, then I think that it
is important to try to make cygwin work with non-binary mount points so that
it will be more generally useful.

marcus hall

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