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From: "phil long" <tinstaafl AT juno DOT com>
Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2007 19:33:50 GMT
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: RE: Deprecating ntea
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Corrina Vinschen wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I think it's time to remove the CYGWIN=ntea setting from Cygwin.
> (see http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using-cygwinenv.html)
> 
> The reason is that it's just a fake.  It fakes POSIX permission bits
> by using the "extended attributes" capability built into NTFS.  it
> also works on FAT by creating a bulky file in the root directory
> of the partition.  Extended attributes were never implemented on
> FAT32, so "ntea" could never work on FAT32.
> 
> So, IMO, ntea is not at all necessary.  Given that practically all
> Windows systems nowadays are using NTFS and given that NTFS supports
> real permissions, not only faked ones, I don't see any need for ntea.
> 
> I even consider ntea as dangerous, because it pretends a security
> which doesn't exist.  That's what the default ntsec setting is for,
> utilizing real permission settings.
> 
> Ok, that's my opinion, which should make it clear that I think
> ntea is old cruft which should be removed from Cygwin.
> 
> My questions are thus: Does anybody seriously use ntea?  Do you think
> you can't live without it?  Is using ntsec or just switching off
> ntsec no option for you?  Why?  Or, to phrase it as I did on the
> cygwin-developers list:
> 
> Does anybody have a good argument to keep this cruft against all
> reason?
> 
> 
> Corinna
> 
> -- 
> Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin
> to
> Cygwin Project Co-Leader          cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
> Red Hat

Corinna:

I agree that 'ntea' should be removed.

Besides being dangerous, it can also cause pain.  When I first started
using Cygwin, I misunderstood the intent of 'ntea' and included it in
the setting of my  CYGWIN environment variable.  Recently, I upgraded
one of my installations, and the 'ntea' setting started causing files
on some fileservers to which I connect to be treated as device files.
Worse yet, these fileservers would occasionally _not_ show up that
way, so the intermittent nature of the problem drove me nuts.
Eventually I removed the 'ntea' setting, and the problem went away.

The lesson I learned was two-fold:
   (1) Be _very_ careful when changing settings from the default;
   (2) Go back occasionally to make _/sure/_ that the settings
       used make sense.

OK, anybody other than the brain-dead should have already known number
2, but I'm a little slower than normal...


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