Re: Cygwin: Interoperability Is Important (was Cygwin: Open or ClosedSystem, etc)

[ejfried at california dot sandia dot gov (friedman_hill ernest j)]

I think Fred T. Hamster wrote:

>     however i am also interested in improving the cygwin project and 
> making things better for the world.

I know it might be slightly annoying of me to just jump in here in the
middle, but as someone who first used cygwin around b15 or so, I think
I can say with absolute certainty that cygwin's current pathname
handling is a wonderful balance between UNIX and Win32 considerations,
and virtually any step towards "improving cygwin" in this area would
actually be a step backwards. The way things work currently is a
delicate balance that has been reached using extensive feedback from
this forum over a long period of time. No changes to the cygwin DLL's
pathname code should even be considered at this point, IMO.

Regarding the handling of pathnames by individual tools: there's a
very simple answer to your problem, which is to not use Win32
pathnames. Is it really any harder to type /a/foo.txt instead of
a:\foo.txt? (I have symlinks at / for /a -> /cygdrive/a, /c ->
/cygdrive/c, etc.) Since they have the same number of characters, I
don't think so.

---------------------------------------------------------
Ernest Friedman-Hill  
Distributed Systems Research        Phone: (925) 294-2154
Sandia National Labs                FAX:   (925) 294-2234
Org. 8920, MS 9012                  ejfried@ca.sandia.gov
PO Box 969                  http://herzberg.ca.sandia.gov
Livermore, CA 94550

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