RE: "Using cygwin Effectively with Windows" -- Draft of new User's Guide section

["Hannu E K Nevalainen \(garbage mail\)" <garbage_collector at telia dot com>]

> From: cygwin-owner@cygwin.com [mailto:cygwin-owner@cygwin.com]On Behalf
> Of Joshua Daniel Franklin

> On Wed, Jul 30, 2003 at 06:20:37PM -0400, Christopher Faylor wrote:
> > My comments:
> >
> > Please don't suggest that setting CYGWIN=tty is necessary for running
> > rxvt.  The only reason to set CYGWIN=tty is if you are running bash
> > in a standard command window.
>
> Here's the updated wording for that:
> --BEGIN--
> To help deal with these issues, Cygwin supports customizable levels of
> Windows verses Unix compatibility behavior. To be most compatible with
> Windows programs, use a DOS prompt, running only the occasional Cygwin
> command or script. Next would be to run bash with the default DOS box. To
> make Cygwin more Unix compatible in this case, set CYGWIN=tty (see the
> section called The CYGWIN environment variable). Alternatively, rxvt,
> an optional package available from setup.exe, provides a native-Windows
> version of the popular X11 terminal emulator. Using rxvt.exe provides
> the most Unix-like environment, but expect some compatibility problems
> with Windows programs.

Maybe add somthing like:
  Once again, having "CYGWIN=tty" isn't meaningful when running rxvt.
here at the end - just to emphasize it.

> --END--

 There might be a better wording for it. I strongly believe that it is
better
to have a _slight_ redundancy in text like this.


Oh... The paragraph about .lnk-files (included below for ref.):
The sentences "feels" long and winding with many commas (,) - this usually
tends to make it harder to read and understand.

NOTE: I'm not saying they actually are - the "feel" is essential here.
I'm not that clear over where my disappointment is, just got a feel about it
;-)

Might be better to try to split the long and winding things into shorter
versions.
Might be just enough to split the paragraph into _several, smaller_
paragraphs
- with a bright and clear "paragraph headline" on top of all of them.
 I'm not saying this is easy, but might be worth the effort to try.

Expected result of rephrasing: Less questions from users.

 I'm not here to tell you what to write - just to give you the impression I
got while reading the text. In hope that this helps create good wording.

/Hannu E K Nevalainen, B.Sc. EE Microcomputer systems - 59?14'N, 17?12'E


--
> --BEGIN--
> Another problem area is between Unix-style links, which link one file
> to another, and Microsoft .lnk files, which provide a shortcut to a
> file. They seem similar at first glance but, in reality, are fairly
> different. While cygwin uses standard Microsoft .lnk files as its
> default symlink mechanism, it does not include much of the information
> that is available in a standard Microsoft .lnk file, such as the working
> directory, an icon, etc. If Cygwin would handle these native shortcuts
> like any other symlink, you could not archive Microsoft .lnk files into
> tar archives and keep all the information in them. After unpacking,
> these shortcuts would be no different than standard Cygwin symlinks,
> so they would have lost all the extra information. Therefore these two
> types of links are treated differently. Unfortunately, this means that
> the usual Unix way of creating and using symlinks does not work with
> Windows shortcuts. The cygutils package includes a mkshortcut utility
> for creating standard Microsoft .lnk shortcuts.
> --END--
--

--END OF MESSAGE--


--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/