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Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2006 14:23:56 -0700
From: Brian Dessent <brian AT dessent DOT net>
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Subject: Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] Updated: vim-7.0.122-1
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Dave Korn wrote:

> > I've tried his test case and Mark is right. When a symlink is created
> > with a win32 path, vim can not create the swapfile. When a symlink is
> > created with POSIX filenames there is no problem.
> 
>   Well of course not.  Cygwin - as a special feature - interprets DOS paths.

Sounds like a good example to add to the list of "using DOS/win32 paths
in Cygwin apps might work but it's by accident."  Off the top of my head
we have:

- devices (e.g. open("com1") appears to work but not if you want to do
ioctls)
- "foocommand c:/path/file" will always open the file in binary mode,
even if the mount table says it should be treated as text mode
- "ln -s c:/foo/bar baz" confuses vim and probably other apps that read
links
- tar (and probably rsync et al.) interprets a file name with a colon to
be a remote hostname

> ... although I can see problems arising when someone uses mount to rename the
> cygdrive mount.  Maybe it would be worth providing a notation that means
> 'cygdrive, no matter how it may have been renamed.

Well the "system32" dir is already a variable.  It is not necessarily
C:\Windows\System32, it could be on another drive, it could be named
something other than "Windows" (I set mine to WINXP during install.)  So
the proper way to do this is "cygpath -S" which takes care of both
problems - it returns a posix path and it queries the proper location of
the system dir.  If base-files is not already using this then it is
seriously broken.

Brian

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