Re: Added some interesting functionality to my cygwin sandbox

[Igor Pechtchanski <pechtcha at cs dot nyu dot edu>]

On Wed, 2 Jul 2003, Christopher Faylor wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 02, 2003 at 11:15:33AM -0400, Igor Pechtchanski wrote:
> >Why?  I just tried it on Linux, and could not create a symlink to an empty
> >path.  If we added some logic to link processing code in Cygwin to revert
> >to the Win32 path if the POSIX path is empty, I don't see any reason why
> >this woulnd't work...  It won't even be a slowdown for normal symlinks,
> >since we'd only do this bit of logic if we failed to open the POSIX path.
>
> I really like this idea.  Corinna?  The symlink stuff is your code.  What
> do you think?

There is, of course, a question of how to create such symlinks...  There
will have to be some way to pass this information to the symlink()
function (which only takes 2 parameters), or create a new function.  We'll
also need a command-line utility for this (either a new "ln" flag, or a
separate program).

> (Of course, you can *always* use the mount table for all of this.  I wonder
> if we should just be using the mount table here.)

Well, we could, I guess, but then we should be consistent, e.g., since we
have /proc/registry, why not have /proc/windir?  Except that I'm not sure
we can mount anything under the /proc subtree...

> >> But as we're trying to get around a problem with cymlink destinations
> >> how about having an internal name like the cygdrive prefix? That way we
> >> could guarentee that it would point to the correct location.
> >
> >Yeah, that's the previously suggested alternative.  However, I'm wary of
> >any hard-coded valid paths...  Corinna's idea is basically that, but with
> >the path that's normally invalid.
>
> Anything which uses a hard-coded path pollutes the name space.

Not if the path is invalid.

> I'd rather avoid that.
>   cgf

FWIW, me too (at least, with valid paths).  I don't think we should care
about invalid paths, as they will never clash with anything in the
namespace anyway.
	Igor
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