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From: "Paul Derbyshire" <derbyshire AT globalserve DOT net>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Date: Sun, 28 Jul 2002 20:31:41 -0400
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Subject: Re: Mysterious gdb behavior.
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On 28 Jul 2002 at 21:20, Robert Collins wrote:

> On Sun, 2002-07-28 at 21:12, Paul Derbyshire wrote:
> > OK. Is anyone going to actually suggest a solution here? And don't 
> > say "rename the directory", I don't imagine renaming the home 
> > directory to something other than your user name is going to do 
> > anything but cause more trouble.
> 
> I won't say what you don't want to hear. You might consider searching
> the friendly archives, because they *tell* you what is worse - a home
> dir with spaces or a home dir w/o spaces.

But once it's set, it's set. If the installer had given me the option 
to choose my Cygwin user name instead of just making it the same as 
the Windows one, and displayed a suggestion not to put spaces in it, 
and made the default the Windows user name with underscores 
substituted for spaces...

> should != doesn't. I agree, it sucks. Still, unless you want to patch
> all the broken software out there (which BTW includes pure win32
> programs last time I checked), then you need to deal with it one way or
> another.

Why isn't most of it (the open source stuff, that is) already 
patched? gdb has been around in various forms for decades.
> 
> > Wherever path names with spaces are handed off to shells or whatever 
> > they should be quoted, that's all. 
> 
> *Please*, research before asserting. Because non-cygwin1.dll linked
> programs don't unquote arguments this solution actually sucks worse than
> the current status quo.

Obviously it should quote them only to other Cygwin linked programs. 
Which it can identify by whether it launching something in the cygwin 
tree or not. In fact, the general rule to quote arguments to a 
program launched purely by name and not to one launched by an 
absolute path would probably work pretty well. Everything on Cygwin's 
PATH can be assumed to unquote arguments I'd imagine.

> Those short names do not always exist - you'll need a fallback for those
> cases.

They do. Windows always assigns an 8.3 version of a filename that has 
a long name, a long extension, multiple extensions (foo.tar.gz, 
etc.), or an unusual character in the name such as a space.

[snip]

Now can anyone suggest a fix here? So far the only thing I've seen 
explicitly suggested is to patch and recompile lots of stuff most of 
whose internals I don't know the first thing about, and the vague 
implication that I should blow the whole system away and reinstall it 
after (finding out how and) changing my Windows username. I'd much 
rather avoid either of those, especially as the latter will cause 
data loss. Obviously the contents of the home directory could be 
copied out but there's a ton of changes made to assorted other files, 
such as /etc/profile, crontab entries, and so on. There's also the 
sheer magnitude of the download.

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