Subject: Re: Cygwin and Interix interoperability?
From: mwoehlke <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2006 09:12:39 -0500
Newsgroups: gmane.os.cygwin

Cary Jamison wrote:
> I read that Vista will have "Built-in NFS for Unix interoperability."
> [snip] If it is true, you may want to wait for Vista, where all your
> problems will be solved! :-)

It's called "Services for UNIX-based Applications" (SUA). It's also in 
Windows 2003 R2, which is what I have. Except maybe for symlinks; those 
are supposed to be "more supported" in Vista, I hear. However, "waiting 
for Vista" is not an option for two reasons. One, I'm impatient, and 
two, we're talking about a build machine. For anyone unfamiliar with 
SCOP (C=Corporate), "build machine" = "don't ever reconfigure this box 
for *any* reason". Putting Vista on it will NOT be an option. Putting 
something as modern as 2003 on it is already a departure.

In other news, I also opened a related 'is this workable' discussion at 
http://www.interopsystems.com/tools/fb.aspx?m=8872 and folks there seem 
to think all that's needed is to hook into the NFS driver (for NFS 
stuff, anyway, but supporting Interix symlinks on a non-POSIX file 
system is trivial, and not my main concern anyway). I was thinking 
Cygwin could check if the underlying file system is NFS and if it is, 
try to dynamically load the NFS client driver. If successful, Cygwin 
would then be able to use the real NFS permissions (and symlinks) rather 
than kluging through ACL's (which doesn't work reliably, as Corinna 
pointed out)... not to mention work with *real* symlinks.

But I'm still just guessing. I haven't gotten to actually *looking* yet 
(it's not exactly in the job description, after all).

-- 
Matthew
Lions and tigers and ...penguins? We're being invaded!

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