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Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2007 18:09:00 -0400 (EDT)
From: Igor Peshansky <pechtcha AT cs DOT nyu DOT edu>
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Subject: Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] Updated: bash-3.2.25-17
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On Fri, 19 Oct 2007, Corinna Vinschen wrote:

> On Oct 19 09:46, Igor Peshansky wrote:
> > On Fri, 19 Oct 2007, Eric Blake wrote:
> > > According to Igor Peshansky on 10/19/2007 7:29 AM:
> > > > I could, but the issue is more basic than where the script lives.
> > > > Right now Cygwin populates the /dev directory as a virtual
> > > > directory within the DLL.  The script I'm talking about will make
> > > > /dev a real directory, and the only thing Cygwin will deal with is
> > > > devices.
>
> I don't see the point.

Ok, fair enough.  There was a mailing list discussion a while ago that
involved Christopher Faylor stating that he'd like to see such
functionality at some point, so I figured I'd work on a script to do that.
If Cygwin wants to keep the files in /dev virtual, I have no problems
keeping the current create_devices.sh script.

> > > > What the transition would entail is not clear to me.
> > >
> > > But the bash postinstall script already creates /dev as a real
> > > directory, as of my release announcement; it just isn't very
> > > populated.  I think making the script its own package in base, then
> > > making bash depend on that package, would be worthwhile.
>
> ...and the syslog-ng-config as well as the syslogd-config scripts
> also create /dev if it doesn't exist so that syslog-ng/syslogd can
> create a /dev/log socket.

Yes, I already corrected myself that I meant the files in /dev, not /dev
itself.

> > Sorry, I was imprecise.  Whether /dev is a real directory or not is
> > irrelevant.  However, the *files* in /dev are virtual, and therefore
> > the command "mknod -m 666 c 1 3 /dev/null" will fail, because, as far
> > as the Cygwin DLL is concerned, /dev/null already exists.
> >
> > Plus, we might get into some ordering issues on when to run this
> > script...
>
> I'm under the impression you're thinking about this too complicated. The
> script could be a postinstall script in the Base category, so it's
> getting run automatically on install.
>
> Cygwin itself does not depend on the existence of /dev, so there's no
> problem with order or so.  For the virtual devices which are handled by
> Cygwin you don't need to call mknod.  Just create empty files, like
> this:
>
>   $ touch `cygpath -am /dev`/null
>   $ ls -l /dev/null
>   crw-rw-rw- 1 corinna root 1, 3 Dec  1  2006 /dev/null
>
> As you can see, Cygwin does never evaluate a DOS path as virtual device,
> while it always evaluates the POSIX path into the virtual device.  Voila.

That is exactly what the current create_devices.sh does.
	Igor
-- 
				http://cs.nyu.edu/~pechtcha/
      |\      _,,,---,,_	    pechtcha AT cs DOT nyu DOT edu | igor AT watson DOT ibm DOT com
ZZZzz /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_		Igor Peshansky, Ph.D. (name changed!)
     |,4-  ) )-,_. ,\ (  `'-'		old name: Igor Pechtchanski
    '---''(_/--'  `-'\_) fL	a.k.a JaguaR-R-R-r-r-r-.-.-.  Meow!

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