Date: Sun, 12 Feb 2006 11:57:00 -0500
From: Christopher Faylor <cgf-no-personal-reply-please@cygwin.com>
To: cygwin@cygwin.com
Subject: Re: default PATH
Message-ID: <20060212165700.GD6042@trixie.casa.cgf.cx>
Reply-To: cygwin@cygwin.com
References: <021120062022.25491.43EE478C000D242F0000639322007456720A050E040D0C079D0A@comcast.net> <20060212120318.GS14219@calimero.vinschen.de>
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On Sun, Feb 12, 2006 at 01:03:18PM +0100, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>On Feb 11 20:22, Eric Blake wrote:
>>I strongly oppose option 3 - cygwin should never add '.' implicitly to
>>the front of a POSIX path - if you are crazy enough to want dot there,
>>put it there yourself explicitly.  But I like option 2, of squeezing
>>';;' into a single ':' (avoiding the implicit dot of $PATH '::'), and
>>ignoring trailing ';' (again, avoiding the implicit dot of $PATH
>>trailing ':').  If the user wants dot in the middle or at the end,
>>automagically converted from the Windows %PATH%, then they can
>>explicitly use ';.;' or trailing ';.' to make their intent clear.  And
>>since Windows always implicitly prepends '.' to %PATH%, this might cut
>>down on the traffic to this list of "how did .  get on my $PATH?".
>>(Although it will probably increase the traffic of "why did ;; get
>>turned into : instead of ::?")
>
>That's unavoidable.  Whatever you do, somebody will complain.

And that is precisely why I suggested asking for feedback in the mailing
list.

I was wondering if there might be at least a couple of people who would
say "Please don't do this because I rely on this behavior".

I don't mind protecting people against the evil 3PP which corrupt the
PATH but, as I said, since we don't get that many complaints about the
current behavior (which may actually have been in place for a decade) we
don't want to necessarily penalize those smart people who have correctly
deduced that Cygwin does a one-to-one translation to/from the windows
path and have therefore put a ;; in their PATH expecting a translation
to :: in the Cygwin path.

If we don't get a single person indicating that they rely on the current
behavior then I'm ok with changing it.  We have a patch ready to be
checked in, in fact.

cgf

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