Subject: Re: available for test: findutils-20041219-1
From: Brian Dessent <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Cc: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2004 21:44:58 -0800

Christopher Faylor wrote:

> >I guess what I'm getting at is it's impossible to patch find (and the
> >various other utilities that were reported to cause a seek) to not
> >invoke the seek.  Do you have any plans to consider applying the Cygwin
> >patch at all or do we just get to live with a floppy seek at every
> >login or invocation of find?
> 
> Let me say it again.  This is not new behavior:
> 
> 2003-08-05  Pavel Tsekov  <[email-masked]>
> 
>         * path.cc (cygdrive_getmntent): Do not skip over drives of type
>         DRIVE_REMOVABLE.
> 
> Perhaps you should be discussing this with Pavel.

Okay, I misunderstood.  I thought that you were saying someone had
posted a patch that would prevent checking floppy drives in that section
of the code.  I now see that it used to be the case that this was done,
and the above patch removed that functionality.

I have no idea what Pavel's intentions were with his change.  I can only
guess it was to support /cygdrive use with some form of removable media,
perhaps floppy, perhaps otherwise.  However at the time it was
committed, there was no mount checking code in find, and so there were
no spurious floppy seeks for opening a login shell and many other
activities.  I will CC him on this email to see if he wants to clarify. 
It seems to me that making this behavior settable through a CYGWIN env
option would satisy everyone, but I'm also quite sure that no patch I
submit to implement this would be accepted, mainly due to not having a
copyright assignment on file.

In all honesty it doesn't bother me at all to run a locally patched DLL
to remove these god awful constant floppy seek delays.  In that sense,
consider the issue resolved from my end.  However, I invision a steadily
increasing stream of angry mailing list posts complaining about this, as
the new findutils eventually becomes more widespread as users update. 
Only trying to be proactive here. :-)

Brian

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