Subject: Re: Feedback needed on proposed cygwin feature
From: [email-masked] (Chris Faylor)

2 Dec 1997 07:30:26 -0800
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Cc: [email-masked]

>Chris Faylor wrote:
>> 
>> I have recently provided a patch to Cygnus to provide control of various
>> environment variable settings on a program by program basis.
>> 
>> Geoffrey has asked that I get feedback on my changes to see if they are
>> something that is useful to the list as a whole.
>> 
>> My changes cause a program to read the registry for options settings prior
>> to reading settings from the environment.  So, for instance, you can do
>> something like this:
>> 
>>         cygwin -o 'c:\bin\bash.exe' binmode notitle
>> 
>> That will set options in the registry which will cause bash to always
>> use 'binmode' as its default and to never modify the title bar.
>> 
>
>	I can see a possible problem: the change is limited to the copy of the
>program in that directory.  If you use the above example, but have
>another copy of the program in a different directory, the changes will
>not carry over, which in some, but not all, eyes could be a bad thing,
>since you would have to have an entry for each instance of the program
>you want to run.  If, however, you just use the program name without the
>path, the changes would be global for all instances of that program,
>which is a little better in my opinion.

I'm not sure that I agree.  Actually, it could be made to check a default
location, the program without the path, and the program with the path but
that would certainly slow down program startup for, IMHO, minimal gain.

I'm also not sure what the gain would be in keeping multiple copies of a
program around.  If you have the same program sitting in multiple directories
it seems to me that you are a candidate for running CleanSweep.

>	But that just brings up another question: what about instances run from
>symlinks?

Symlinks are a cygwin construction.  The actual program being run is always
the program that they point to.  GetModuleFilename returns the actual
path name of the program and that is what I (currently) use.
--
http://www.bbc.com/	[email-masked]			"Strange how unreal
VMS=>UNIX Solutions	Boston Business Computing	 the real can be."
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