Subject: Re: File name syntax (WAS: RE: FW: Can not config sshd)
From: Chris Faylor <[email-masked]>
To: "Larry Hall (RFK Partners, Inc)" <[email-masked]>
Cc: "[email-masked]" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 27 May 2000 20:06:31 -0400

On Sat, May 27, 2000 at 01:10:33PM -0400, Larry Hall (RFK Partners, Inc) wrote:
>From my understanding of Ron's goals, I would say no.  He was
>proposing, AFAICT, that the UNC convention be replaced by NFS syntax
>for all paths.  Since NFS path syntax is really just an artifact of
>mount in the UNIX world, I wanted to be sure that he realized the
>implication that this would have.  AFAIK, tar is the only GNU utility
>that attempts to parse an NFS path itself.  I don't know of any other
>utility that does this.  I'm really luke-warm about the syntax change
>because I'm not really sure that NFS paths are more "UNIX- like" than
>UNC paths.  However, my main concern is if such a change is to happen
>that some mechanism be maintained so that network shares could be
>accessed though a simple path without requiring a mount to make it
>work.  Ron's response here was that the NFS syntax would fill that
>role, if I understood him correctly.
>
>Supporting NFS mount syntax in the mount table is a separate issue.  At
>this point, I don't have a problem with that idea although I also don't
>see an overwhelming need.
>
>Does this help clarify things for you?

I think I already understood the proposal but I don't understand why it
is being referred to as "NFS path syntax".  We aren't talking about,
AFAICT, NFS path syntax as much as we are referring to the syntax that
rcp, mount, and tar use for referring to remote files.

The goal here was to eliminate the special meaning of '//' since it is
"non-UNIX like" and to introduce the concept of remote file referral
using a "foo:/bar" syntax.  However, I think that having every program
automatically understand foo:/bar syntax is really not moving towards
UNIX compatibility.

On UNIX the programs which understand the colon syntax are specially
written to do so.  They don't rely on the OS to do translations.  So,
I don't think that it's a good idea to modify Cygwin to do this.

As far as slashes are concerned, however, maybe, adding a CYGWIN
environment variable would be ok, something on the order of
CYGWIN=collapse_all_slashes or something...

cgf

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