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

[Joshua Daniel Franklin <joshuadfranklin at yahoo dot com>]

> On Wed, Jul 30, 2003 at 11:18:07AM -0700, Joshua Daniel Franklin wrote:
> >If you'd like to look at it as a web page:
> ><http://iocc.com/~joshua/tmp/using-effectively.html>
> >
> >I'm going to be leaving this broadband connection in under 48 hours,
> >so I'll probably put this into CVS tomorrow (with any corrections) 
> >unless there is a horrendous outcry against it. Then I'll be in and 
> >out of contact for probably a(nother) couple of weeks while I move. 

The above still applies...

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.
--END--

> I think the section which talks about symlinks could talk a little bit
> about what a symlink is before discussing what they are not.  Maybe there
> should be something along the lines of:
> 
> Like UNIX, Cygwin provides the powerful feature of "symbolic links".
> This feature allows you to link one filename to another.  Microsoft
> provides ".lnk" files which seems 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.

--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--


By the way, this has nothing to do with the User's Guide, but I made
a script to download (using the mailing list archive) all the July
emails into mbox format. I thought it would be easier than asking someone
for the archive off the server. Well, now I can't get a HTTP connection
to cygwin.com/sources.redhat.com/gcc.gnu.org. I can ping and I can use
CVS, and I can access it with lynx via shell accounts on various networks.
So I'm thinking my pummeling the mailing list's cgi-bin access was
a stupid idea. Ummm... who's forgiveness do I ask?


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