Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] Public Cygwin 1.7 test starts today

[Ken Brown <kbrown at cornell dot edu>]

On 12/12/2008 9:31 AM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> On Dec 11 13:14, Ken Brown wrote:
> > I think you forgot to mention the change to st_nlink [1], which will affect 
> > some applications.  For example, the kpathsea search library for texlive 
> > needs to be patched to accommodate the change.  (I've sent the patch to the 
> > tlbuild list in case anyone is interested.)  This might also apply to 
> > cygwin's tetex package, but I haven't tested it.
>
> Yes, that's right.  I forgot about that.  I didn't know that more than
> just findutils and coreutils are affected.  In theory, every tool
> should be able to deal with st_nlink == 1.  It's not the right value
> for an emtpy dir, which would be 2, so any tool should check what's
> actually going on in that dir.

In the case of kpathsea, the program was deliberately relying on 
st_nlink to speed up searching on systems that it viewed as "unix-like", 
including cygwin.  [It didn't check for subdirectories unless st_nlink > 
2.]  Fortunately, this was documented, and it was easy to make a 
configuration change to tell it to exclude cygwin for this purpose.  I 
don't know how likely it is that other applications will similarly cut 
corners.

Ken

--
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/