Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help AT sourceware DOT cygnus DOT com; run by ezmlm List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: cygwin-owner AT sources DOT redhat DOT com Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin AT sources DOT redhat DOT com From: "Robert Praetorius" Organization: Ministry of Hobo Regalia, Gauntlet Division To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 06:52:43 +1000 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Re: Cygwin: Interoperability Is Important (was Cygwin: Open or Closed System, etc) Reply-to: RPraetorius AT AspenRes DOT Com CC: "Fred T. Hamster" Message-ID: <3B3AD43B.29470.667BEF09@localhost> In-reply-to: <3B3A3051.2000000@gruntose.com> X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.12c) Date sent: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 15:13:21 -0400 From: "Fred T. Hamster" Copies to: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Subject: Re: Cygwin: Interoperability Is Important (was Cygwin: Open or Closed System, etc) > . . . regarding users, is it really being advocated that cygwin is > unix, burrowed into win32, but not supporting any of those still > stuck in the windows world at all? all users must sprechen diesen > wunderslashes from unix? it may be unbelievable, but i do prefer to > use only forward slashes as often as possible. it is not always > possible. . . . > one issue that hasn't been stated: i do not wish to try to change > the way everyone uses their slashes at the place where i work. > that is an uninteresting exercise in OS theology which i will not > engage in anytime soon. perhaps it was a mistake to think that the > cygwin environment was really the right choice for getting work > done with these officemates, since many of them have a microsoft > tool-user history. but i persist in thinking the issues are not so > devastating that a modified implementation would not succeed in > supporting them as well. . . . Since I'm pretty happy with the current state of Cygwin (many thanks to all who have contributed) and am therefore quite unlikely to undertake a change to slash handling in zip, I'd like to suggest an approach that I think is reasonably elegant, if somewhat labor- intensive. (That is, since I don't expect to be doing it, I don't care how hard it is:-) Common Lisp has an interface that abstracts the assembly and disassembly of pathnames and filenames so it can be done somewhat portably on different operating systems: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/cltl/clm/node214.html I know Lisp is not for everyone, but if you skim this and ignore the parentheses and X3J13 notes, you'll pretty quickly get the gist of it. It may be that Cygwin already incorporates such an interface and I just failed to notice it, or that there's already copylefted software the implements such a system for C/C++ programs. I just mentioned the Common Lisp one as a starting point for discussion since it happened to be the one that I know of. Anyway, it seems to me that, for software that may run on many platforms, abstraction of filename & pathname syntax is probably a pretty good idea. And that people would hardly object to a concerted effort to systematically change widely used software to be more platform independent in this area (as long as it didn't break things). And if there's some passion around path handling in zip, maybe that's a good starting point. BTW, has anybody noticed that win32 is officially bislashual? http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/fileio/hh/winbase/filesio_7qwj.asp (this may have already come up - I haven't read every word in the torrential dialogs of recent days) ----g-i-v-e---m-e---a-r-b-e-r-r-y---o-r---g-i-v-e---m-e---b-a-r-k-s----- "oncology recapitulates philately" --Mark Maxson Robert M. Praetorius "balance, not symmetry" --Mark Stanley home: rmp AT MA DOT UltraNet DOT Com (attribution by Stigler) work: RPraetorius AT AspenRes DOT Com -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Bug reporting: http://cygwin.com/bugs.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/