Re: How big are your /etc/passwd and /etc/group files?

[Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin at cygwin dot com>]

On Feb  4 02:22, Andrey Repin wrote:
> Greetings, Corinna Vinschen!
> 
> > - In SAM (only used for local accounts), there are no freely definable
> >   fields for users or groups, except for the "Description" field.
> >   Therefore, you can set values using a faux-XML syntax in the
> >   "Description" field.  Here's what is supported right now:
> 
> >   <CYGWINNAME:bla/>    overrides Windows username/groupname
> >   <CYGWINHOME:path/>   sets the Cygwin home directory to "path"
> >   <CYGWINSHELL:shell/> sets the login shell to "shell"
> 
> Seems a bit overcomplicated, and hardly readable. (The main point of inventing
> XML, along extensibility and easy machine parsing, was the human readability,
> which people seems to forgot quite quick.)
> Why not just
> <cygwin name="user" home="/home/user" shell="/bin/bash"/>
> ?

Yeah, that makes sense, I guess.  I didn't claim that all my ideas
were well thought out...

> Also, does this change means, that by default, the Cygwin user's home
> directory will finally match the user's Windows profile directory?
> Good if that.

Cygwin will read the unixHomeDirectory entry (AD), or the CYGWINHOME
entry in the Description (SAM), but the default is still /home/$USER.
Cygwin will not start to utilize the profile path as default home
directory, nor will it read the homeDirectory entry.  There's a
chicken-egg problem which can't be easily solved.


Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Maintainer                 cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat

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