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From: <gmt AT malth DOT us>
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References: <003501ce6b5f$b41f2c10$1c5d8430$%fedin AT samsung DOT com> <kpn4kk$p88$1 AT ger DOT gmane DOT org>
In-Reply-To: <kpn4kk$p88$1@ger.gmane.org>
Subject: RE: UNC and POSIX paths
Date: Mon, 17 Jun 2013 08:12:10 -0700
Message-ID: <036c01ce6b6d$0ada5090$208ef1b0$@malth.us>
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On Mon, 17 Jun 2013, at 06:57, Andrew DeFaria thusly quipped:

> On 06/17/2013 06:36 AM, Fedin Pavel wrote:
>>   Hello!
>>   
>>   I decided to pay attention to one more problem. Lots of not very
>> well written configure scripts and makefiles like to access things
>> like '//usr/bin'. Under Cygwin this causes problem because Cygwin
>> treats '//' in Windows-style as access to network shares.
>>   What if we change this ? We could have a mount entry, something like
'/unc'
>> (or /smb, /net, whatever) and access it like
'/smb/computername/sharename'.
>> I think this would improve POSIX compatibility a lot.
> Why not simply fix the "not very well written configure scripts and
makefiles"
> instead? BTW I've never come across a single one of those.
> Where are you getting yours?

Can't answer this offhand (aware you didn't ask me :P) but, under the
misguidance of PM's like Gentoo(portage) and rpm(build), when combined with
poorly and/or belligerently written packaging scripts, this can happen
incessantly.  But that mostly only comes up when building Frankencygwins.
Sometimes you can fix it by forcing something like --prefix=///usr/local.

A CYGWIN env flag to disable UNC paths, or graft them somewhere other than
//, or an fstab-hack--basically anything allowing one to turn this feature
off--would be a moderate blessing for a small number (greater than or equal
to one) of people, but SHTDI, and this is endlessly proposed and
insta-shot-down.

At least one "merit-based" argument does recommend against implementing this
-- a great many configure scripts test for whether // == /, which means
packages could break if packagers happened to build while using the proposed
anti-feature-feature (the inevitable response being, "shouldn't those
packages just fix their broken configure scripts"? :P)

-gmt


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