Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2007 13:55:47 -0400
From: Christopher Faylor <cgf-use-the-mailinglist-please AT cygwin DOT com>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Latest snapshot revamps pipe/fifo handling
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I've checked in a fairly major change to cygwin today.

I yanked out a lot of the win9x specific pipe handling code in the
latest snapshot and used pure Windows NT (and later) functionality
instead.  That means that fifos are actually named pipes under the hood
and both fifos and pipes are using overlapped I/O to allow themselves to
be interruptible; meaning that the special pipe thread kludge implemented
for Windows 9x is now gone.

What this means in practice is that pipe handling in snapshots may be a
little faster.  Pipes and fifos will probably also be a little less
stable since I'm sure to discover that some of the stuff I yanked out
probably had meaning even on NT-class systems.

I'll be doing more testing over the weekend but I wanted to give people
a heads up to expect some potential instability.  If you do detect a
problem please report it here, along with details.

If you don't have time to report details, need to mention how busy you
are, need to stress how much you don't know C, want to inform on how
well it used to work in previous releases, or express puzzlement that it
works fine on linux, then don't bother sending mail.  Otherwise, I'd
like to hear about problems.

Reports will include cygcheck output and the exact sequence of steps
needed to reproduce the problem.  The "exact sequence" will show the
exact commands or source code which caused the problem and will not be a
general, vague description of the problem.  The problem will not include
words like "doesn't work for me" or "crapped out" or "bit the big one"
but will instead include words like "died with signal N and here is the
stack trace" or "did not seem to provide any output as you can see from
this screen capture".

See http://cygwin.com/problems.html for more details and be sure to read
more than just the part that says to include cygcheck output.

cgf
(who is now placing bets)

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