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Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2006 07:25:20 -0700
From: George <d1945 AT sbcglobal DOT net>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: Cygwin filesystem
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On Mon, Sep 18, 2006 at 03:44:52PM +0400, Francis Rossi wrote:
> The problem with the folder Cygwin is installed to is that when you're 
> looking for some files on your hard disk, that directory takes a lot 
> of time in the search because of dozens of thousands files, especially 
> in /usr. 

Sounds like you've done a I Want Everything With Fries installation.  
Not everyone does. 

Irrespective of how few or how many dozens of thousands of files you 
have, locate(1) is your friend, updatedb(1) will pay for the drinks and 
cron(8) will be your designated driver without complaining.

> Another issue is deleting the Cygwin installation, it can take hours, 
> for the same reason. I think it could be resloved by creating a 
> separate partition for /usr and placing it into a separate file with 
> virtual filesystem like on VMWare or Bochs.  

Wouldn't that be counter-productive if not counter-intutitive for those 
of us who install Cygwin in Windows' vmware images? 

$ time find / | wc -l
133302
real    0m50.049s
user    0m7.249s
sys     0m19.718s

That's one minute to find all of them, roughly the same length of time 
that an updatedb cron job would require.  A fair estimate to delete them 
all would be a few minutes, and not hours.  Unless, of course, you're 
doing it using Windows explorer and relying on the progress bar's 
incomprehensibly bizarre and wildly-fluctuating estimates as a measure 
of how things are progressing.

So why not install Cygwin into its own Windows partition?  Seems 
prudent for a large installation of any sort.

> When Cygwin is started this partition would be mounted like Windows 
> disks and deleting it would last as long as one click.

As would mounting and/or deleting a separate Windows partition, no?  
Personally, I can't think of any reason for deleting a Cygwin 
installation.  The typical Wipe and Reinstall approach of using Windows 
doesn't really apply to *nix based systems or, by extension, to Cygwin.  

Cheers.

-- 
George


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