On Jan 09, linda w (cyg) wrote: > > Cygwin targets POSIX compatibility wherever possible. Any > > discussion about paths that ignores the POSIX standards will > > need to be reviewed with POSIX in mind. It's easier to do > > that up front. > --- > What were the _original_ design goals of Cygwin -- i.e. as > sponsored by "RedHat"? > > If one claims that the original project pages are irrelevant or not > appropriate to use as a specification of the project intention, then I'd say > that Cygwin has been moved off of the original project goals and > is no longer "the same" project, but something else. > > Changing the original goals to suit the aesthetic sensibilities of > project maintainers is very different from creating a useful compatibility > layer for RedHat customers to port applications from Linux to the Win32 > environment and use those applications and tools _seamlessly_ with *native* > Win32 applications. Putting on an 'enterprise' hat, I don't want my Win32 or > Linux sys admins to have to learn to use separate path syntaxes depending on > which tool they are using in the Win32 environment. A project goal/feature > that was listed was the ability to use Win32 tools intermixed with usage of > Unix [redhat linux] utils. > > Under any major, user-oriented version of Unix that I am aware > of, "//" is reduced to "/" by the *OS*. This is perfectly POSIX compliant > behavior. The restriction of non-assumptions of "//"=="/" are on _applications_ > that desire to be POSIX compliant -- it is not a restriction on the OS.
That's not a feature of the OS, it's a feature of the filesystem. The fact that Unix-like OS's *typically* use ext2fs/ffs/etc. as their primary filesystems, and that MS OS's *typically* use, um, any of about seven filesystems with a variety of case-sensitivity, maximum- filename-length, valid characterset, path separator, and directory structure permutations is orthogonal. Your sysadmins don't need to learn different path syntaxes for different *environments*, but they do for different *filesystems*. You can mount an HPFS filesystem on a Linux box, and you can mount an FFS filesystem on a Windows box. Either way, you will have to cope. - Kurt -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Bug reporting: http://cygwin.com/bugs.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/