Message-ID: <4B074F7A.4060303@tlinx.org>
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:24:58 -0800
From: Linda Walsh <cygwin AT tlinx DOT org>
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To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: win7 specific probs; examples; and poor solutions
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Andy Koppe wrote:
> 2009/11/20 Linda Walsh:
>> 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.
> 
> We'd of course need concrete examples for this.
----

   I'd love to give you examples, but unless I am sure that it is cygwin
that has the problem, I'm not going to put something on here.  I did
mention, that my 'rash' of problems may have to do with Win7 begin flakey
in some way, OR 'linda7' i.e. _me_, having broken something or not
understanding how something works.  I also mentioned that most of my
problems on win7 DO NOT happen on my XP machine.  So that indicates it's
either win7 specific, OR my configuration on Win7 isn't as detailed nor
setup as well as my XP setup which is several years old.


>> 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. 
> 
> Same as above.
---

   Ditto.


>> I still haven't figured out why -- but the values for cygdrive prefix
>> won't stay stored.
> 
> That's because you now have to set it in /etc/fstab to make it
> permanent, e.g.:
> 
> none /mnt cygdrive binary 0 0
---

   I did THAT, as part of my debugging.  I copied over the line from my
working XP config:

   none / cygdrive binary,posix=0,user 0 0

onto my non working Win7 config -- and it had no effect on newly started
copies of a shell (either using minTTY or console2).

> See here: http://cygwin.com/1.7/cygwin-ug-net/using.html#mount-table
---

   I skimmed that section but didn't see a reference to 'cygdrive prefix'.

I saw a section for "The Cygdrive Path Prefix", but didn't see any option
to reset it.  So I copied the working line (that I didn't create.  Maybe
"mount -c" created it, but that's a guess, I think I modified it to say
posix=0, as that's what I'm used to.  I'd rather keep Cygwin somewhat
compatible with Windows programs that I use Cygwin to 'manage'.


> 
> 
>> 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.
> 
> cgf recently implemented that.
---

   I read that he did that -- but that doesn't explain why it worked on my
XP machine, but not on my Win7 machine that was installed from the same
install base.  That was my 'issue', but AFAIK, it's some flakiness in
Win7, I don't have enough experience with Win7 (I skipped Vista entirely),
to know what's what.  I was just mentioning 'symptoms' that could be
nothing to do with cygwin, OR could be some odd interaction with my
settings on Win7.


>>  I've had changes made to files disappear
> 
> Again, vague hand-waving is no help here.
---

   No waiving of hands was necessary.  But a concrete example (using
find+file to look text files under /prog/vim (/Program Files (x86)/Vim)
and running dos2unix on each did run -- and 'vi' at cmd prompt worked.
But later (yesterday, vi and cmd prompt gave CRLF related errors again.  I
reran the conversion, differently, and it worked again.  

   I use VIMRUNDIR="C:/Prog/Vim", in my environment.  This stems to a need
for 'GVim' to know it's RUNTIME dir regardless of how it is invoked. 

   In order for 'GVim' to effectively replace 'notepad' for all things
text, it needs to have a link in /Windows/system32/.  Unfortunately, when
invoked from there, it can't find it's RUNTIMEDIR.  So I set the global
var.

   BUT, that created a problem for 'vim' under cygwin when I did edits in
a cmd window -- as it would pickup the runtime dir in C:/Prog/Vim.
Fortunately, the Win-version of Gvim is advanced enough to handle
line-endings of CRLF OR LF -- so I convert all of the text files in the
Win-version of 'Vim/Gvim' from "CRLF" to "LF".  Then all I need to do is
keep the versions syncronized in major point release, and the cygwin-vim
and Win-Gvim, can share config files.

   They also share my home dir's .vimrc, .gvimrc, and .vimdir.

   In order to not have interference with cygwin's gvim, I rename it to
"xvim" as it uses "X".  I sometimes use it for it's better international
character support.  the Windows Gvim is broken when it comes to handling
non-monospaced character fonts (unicode) while the Cygwin X version
handles them.


>> 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.
> 
> /proc/registry/HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/HARDWARE looks fine here.
---

    Yes.  I'm happy for you.  And when did you first use something above
'XP'?  (vista or Win7?)  I'm still in the 'oh frack, I did what?!' stage.

> 
>> 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.
> 
> Known problem, but I can't remember the details. See the cygwin-xfree
> list.
---

   Some suggest using the bogus string  "C.utf-8", but that isn't a valid
locale (yet).  I could use that, but it would cause compatibility with
many non-broken apps that expect *valid* language strings.

   For example, try setting your language string to C.utf-8 in Firefox, or
more specifically, 'songbird' -- then try getting scrobbling to work with
the "last.fm" site.  You'll find the scrobbling service won't be able to
log in.  If you don't use standard and accepted locale strings, you will
get random things that 'break' -- and they will be insanely difficult to
track down.


>> I really don't get why people would prefer
>> to have to press control-h or control-backspace to backspace-delete.
> 
> Erm, you don't. You press the Backspace the key, as always. Meanwhile,
> the change to ^? frees up Ctrl+H for other purposes, e.g. help in emacs.
----
   Why couldn't EMACS users just use 'stty erase '^?' to reset
their keyboard as _we_ have to do now (stty erase '^h').

   Was it just too difficult for them?  I thought they were
high IQ types?  Why would they need a hack in cygwin to fix things
for them?  IT seems like an unnecessary breaking of compatibility.


>> 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.
>
> No need to program specific exceptions. The ERASE keycode in the tty
> settings tells you where it's at. Read it using tcgetattr or stty.
> Makes your programs portable to other Unices too.


   At this point, it seems sufficient simple to add:

stty erase ^h in my local login-init.

  It makes 'my' cygwin more compatible with my windows and linux
boxen.  As long as there's an easy work-around, I'll not care much.
I find it very ironic that gnumax users who have the attitude of
superiority that all should adapt to them (forcing all gnu-docs into
emax-compat .info format, fostering off 'grub' as a grand-unified
bootloader that doesn't work as well or reliably as 'ancient', 'simple' lilo...taking 15 years to begin to include perl-re's in 'grep'...
etc. etc. etc....), are then too ignorant to figure how to remap 
their own keys.  But I guess it takes the rest of the world to make 
allowances for their 'genius' ideas and attempt to
work around them!...*snort*.


-l


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