X-Recipient: archive-cygwin AT delorie DOT com X-SWARE-Spam-Status: No, hits=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=AWL,BAYES_00,RP_MATCHES_RCVD,SPF_HELO_PASS X-Spam-Check-By: sourceware.org To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com From: Andrew DeFaria Subject: Re: tar deletes .exe files on extraction (again) Date: Fri, 23 Sep 2011 11:46:44 -0700 Lines: 27 Message-ID: References: <4E7BE736 DOT 1060008 AT cygwin DOT com> <4E7C9DF7 DOT 2090200 AT cs DOT utoronto DOT ca>

<2A62C54E-AD21-4B4E-9261-19F0F6AA01F3 AT blighty DOT com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:6.0.2) Gecko/20110902 Thunderbird/6.0.2 In-Reply-To: <2A62C54E-AD21-4B4E-9261-19F0F6AA01F3@blighty.com> X-Stationery: 0.7.5 X-IsSubscribed: yes Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Id: List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: cygwin-owner AT cygwin DOT com Mail-Followup-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin AT cygwin DOT com On 9/23/2011 11:26 AM, Steve Atkins wrote: > I'm talking about developers of applications, not cygwin-using end users. The developers could work around it (by not including .exe bootstrap files in cross-platform packages or being careful with naming), but they don't because it's not an issue that would ever occur to them, unlike case-insensitivity. > > Many systems are case-insensitive Really? Aside from Windows what other systems are case insensitive? > - and, more importantly, at least one system that's commonly used by developers is - so most software is developed and packaged with that in mind. Case insensitivity is a well understood issue. Only one system, cygwin, considers foo and foo.exe to be identical. And as far as I can tell, only one system Windows, is case insensitive WRT filenames. Coincidence? I don't think so! ;-) > It's a niche environment, and not used by many developers who target a unix-style environment, so most developers packaging software will not be aware of the issue and won't work around it. I don't think I've met many developers who target a Unix-style environment who did not know about Cygwin and, if forced to use Windows, use Cygwin. Granted the foo vs. foo.exe thing is a bit obscure, but I'd say that a Unix developer actually naming something .exe is also pretty rare. > Treating "foo" and "foo.exe" as equivalent is a very non-unixy thing to do Neither is naming some thing with a .exe at the end! > ("everything is a file, and the name of the file isn't important to the kernel") so it's particularly surprising behaviour on a system that otherwise looks quite like a unix environment. > > (I'd assumed that cygwin worked by intercepting execve(), and it hadn't even occurred to me that it would modify filesystem access at a coarser level than that until I started diagnosing apparent bugs in tar). > > It's not a serious problem, of course - but it does mean that the most widely used cross-platform GUI library cannot be unpacked on cygwin and built from source without jumping through hoops. Given that the cygwin environment is very attractive to cross-platform developers I'm betting I'm not the first person who has been burned by this, and won't be the last. So why don't you ask them to fix it? I mean what do they need a foo and a foo.exe for anyway? > I'm not sure what the best thing to do about it is - but even a user level patch to tar and unzip to warn when it's done something unexpected would have saved me quite a lot of grief. -- Andrew DeFaria Don't drink and drive... You might hit a bump and spill your drink. -- 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