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Message-ID: <16071.62978.20742.367143@gargle.gargle.HOWL>
Date: Sun, 18 May 2003 14:07:14 -0700
From: Martin Buchholz <martin AT xemacs DOT org>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Using Cygwin on NT 4.0 and Win2000; a user experience
Reply-To: martin AT xemacs DOT org

Thank you very much for your work on Cygwin.  It has allowed me to
create an environment in which a Windows machine is just another Unix
box somewhere on the network.  I never log on to the Windows console,
except to perform occasional system administration (like upgrading Cygwin!).

However, everything is not perfect yet.  Here are my impressions:

- The recent change to make NTFS files SPARSE by default is a
  disaster -- less space and time efficient for "normal" files.
  Please undo this.  More details in a separate message.

- The "grep" package comes with a grep.exe (and no file "grep"), but
  no egrep.exe (instead it has a "egrep").  Of course this is easy for
  the user to fix, but the package should be fixed as well.

- There have been many reports of rsync hanging, accompanied by an
  "rsync" process that cannot be killed by "kill -9".  I have
  experienced the same, but only on NT 4.0 SP6, not on Win2000.

- To fix the SPARSE file problem, I tried hacking the source.  This
  process could be better documented.  In particular, it's not obvious
  that you can do
  ../src/configure --prefix=/install ... && make && make install
  and later you can copy the files from /install to their final
  resting places in /bin, etc...  Files often stop working when their PREFIX
  is no longer around.

  I couldn't figure out how to update cygwin1.dll without having to
  wander over to the console (which is often several miles away...), 
  but I'm certain there's a way, and you
  guys have figured it out.  You should share your secret with us.

  I imagine you could do
  ../src/configure --prefix=/install ... && make && make install
  and create a (non-Cygwin) bootup script that checks if there's a
  c:/cygwin/install/bin/cygwin1.dll and if so, moves it to c:/cygwin/bin/.
  This bootup script would have to run before any Cygwin services like
  sshd are started.

Martin

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