Message-ID: <4B061292.1060301@tlinx.org>
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:52:50 -0800
From: Linda Walsh <cygwin AT tlinx DOT org>
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.22) Gecko/20090605 Lightning/0.9 Thunderbird/2.0.0.22 ThunderBrowse/3.2.6.5 Mnenhy/0.7.6.666
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: "cygwin AT cygwin DOT com" <cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
Subject: one or more not ready for prime time( cygwin1.7, win7, linda7).
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com; run by ezmlm
Sender: cygwin-owner AT cygwin DOT com
Mail-Followup-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com

Close...very close, but I keep running into unexplained flakiness.

like I change something in the file system or registry, and it changes
back.

Some things are obviously not cygwin related.  But sometimes it seems
like cygwin isn't able to see files that I can see there with
explorer.

Things like 'updatedb' seem to find a paltry number of files that I
can see.

It should be running as 'me' when it's started by me!  But I don't
know if it is a some random permissions thing, or some 32bit-ism.  The
registry I can mostly grok -- but I'm having other programs claiming
to get permission denied from reg keys that are full control for me
AND system.  

I still haven't figured out why -- but the values for cygdrive prefix
won't stay stored.

This is related to my initial complaint about the full-screen effect
on setup.

Setup WASN'T storing my choice -- it was blowing up to full each time.

Then, ... it didn't.  Guess it decided to store it.  Whether values
"stay" is pretty unclear.  I've had changes made to files disappear,
unfortunately, it looks like I had part of my registry disappear as
well -- the part having to do with HARDWARE appears to be missing --
can't find the file it maps and going to the key gives a file-not
found message.  

Since I'm not 'rm' ing anything, it shouldn't be a cygwin prob -- but
it disappeared in the same 'big' timewindow that I was resetting some
file permissions/ownerships.

I'm not sure.  But there's this feature turned on by default in Vista
and Win7 to redirect a 'no-access' to an object, to a virtualized
copy, so the process (or user) gets to play with a copy -- but nothing
that the underlying system is actually using.  It's there to provide
compatibility, but also to keep users and programs from mucking with
the OS and making changes in anything at the core OS level.  I'm not
sure but it might have to do with keeping the 'TCB' safe, so they can
guarantee the machine is safe to load digital material on and not have
the material compromised.  But whatever the cause, it's causing lots
of flakeyness.

One thing -- trying to run various X utils, I get odd errors -- like
fonts not being found or things like: Warning: Cannot convert string
"-adobe-helvetica-bold-r-normal--*-120-*-*-*-*-is o8859-*" to type
FontStruct Warning: Unable to load any usable ISO8859 font Warning:
Unable to load any usable ISO8859 font Warning: Missing charsets in
String to FontSet conversion Error: Aborting: no font found ---- But I
thought things were unicode now?  I made sure to export
LANG=en_US.utf-8 as well as LC_ALL, but neither made a difference.

I'm sure I had man pages -- and "xprogs" WERE working (still do on
XP!)...so I'm not saying cygwin 1.7 doesn't work -- on XP seems mostly
an improvement thought I don't like backspace being turned into a
delete.  My keyboard is a NOT a linux keyboard, it's a PC keyboard and
should be mapped as such!  I really don't get why people would prefer
to have to press control-h or control-backspace to backspace-delete.
Trouble is it makes for horrible compatibility problems with programs
that can be called in different environments (mintty, console,
standalone, remote crt)...  It's hard to program exceptions for all of
them.

BUT -- if you want it to be like linux, I assume you'll allow us to
load our own keymap at runtime?  That way all some of us that want
Backspace to remain compatible with the rest of our life can remap it
back to backspace and leave 'delete to the DEL key.  Yeah, I know
there used to be a key called rubout -- but I haven't seen the rubout
key on modern keyboards in ages!  So grasping at the past isn't really
a basis for for rebranding the backspace key as 'rubout'.

Anyway, it looks like I may have to tear down my new system again and
start it again.  This is living alot more on the cutting edge than I'm
usually happy with --

but I'm so VERY happy about the UTF-8 support -- seeming my foreign
characters in the shell...wow...orgamic!  

Maybe something cygwin needs on 64-bit systems.  a 64-bit version of
cygrun, so we can at least start 64-bit programs?  Many programs have
2 versions and will give you the 32-bit version if you start it from a
32bit program.  Ug!  Only when there's no 32-bit equiv can you be sure
to get a 64bit version.  

Anyway...back to the salt mines.


--
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple