From: corinna DOT vinschen AT cityweb DOT de (Corinna Vinschen) Subject: Re: New winsup snapshot 9/14/98 18 Sep 1998 04:53:25 -0700 Message-ID: <3602451D.CDDC720E.cygnus.cygwin32.developers@cityweb.de> References: <19980914141243 DOT 37248 AT cygnus DOT com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: Christopher Faylor , cygwin32-developers AT cygnus DOT com Christopher Faylor wrote: > Well, for one reason, I don't like the idea of doing essentially a "scanf" > or a strtok every time we open a file to determine major and minor numbers. It would only appear in /dev. > For another we have an existing problem which is that Windows 95 does not > currently have a method for setting UNIX protections. If we are able to > deal with the Windows 95 problem then a method for giving files major and > minor device numbers is not far behind. I think, I understand what you mean. Then you would add a extended attribute of type ".DEVICE", which has only a sense, if ".UNIXATTR" contains S_IFCHR or S_IFBLK, or sth. like that, wouldn't you? But it's a question of taste. I simply like solutions in form of the current symlink file and it doesn't scare me to parse the contents with strtok or whatever. But for UNIX attribs you are right. The possibilities of NTFS should definitly be used in this case. OK, I don't want to be stolid. I agree to you for NTFS, but the solution for Win9X users and FAT partitions doesn't sound funny. Personally, I don't want to have an extra file in any directory, which has the bad luck, to live on FAT. But a filename beginning with a dot would allay the pain :-) Would you agree, that the ! would be better for a /dev file in case of FAT (and 9X)? Unfortunately, the problem of supporting two different methods (with double error count) stays. > > As far as NT soup is concerned, wasn't it you who suggested putting the > device information in the registry? Right, but it was only my first idea in this context. Doesn't it seem, I'm convinced of the real /dev? But this points to a new question: If you want to do without the registry, wouldn't it be better then, to have a /etc/mtab file for the mount points? Corinna