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RE: 1.3.2, 1.1.8: Pipelines losing data? (Windows 2000) (fwd)


Hi Russell, 
	this isn't aimed at you personally!

> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Fri, 7 Sep 2001 11:19:50 -0500 (CDT)
> From: D.J. Miller II <jamesm@realtime.net>
> Reply-To: jamesm@bga.com
> To: sears@cis.ohio-state.edu
> Subject: RE: 1.3.2, 1.1.8: Pipelines losing data? (Windows 2000)
> 
> Hi, Russell,
> 
> I found the following post from you in the cygwin mailing list archive
> (http://sources.redhat.com/ml/cygwin/2001-07/threads.html#00028):
> 
> Well, hello from one of those other users!
> 
> I'm running cygwin 1.3.2 on Windows 2000 ("WinNT Ver 5.0 build 2195
> Service Pack 1") on a Dell Dimension 4100 with a ~1 GHz pentium ("x86
> Family 6 Model 8 Stepping 10 GenuineIntel ~1000 Mhz") and am seeing a
> problem similar to yours with pipes.  In particular, when I run the
> following one-line sh script at the bash prompt (I've put 
> line breaks in
> it here in this message for readability) I get really erratic results:
> 
> There are two interesting feature about the results of the above
> script.  First is that the results change from run to run; in other
> words there's a race condition in there somewhere.  Second is that it
> appears that "extra" data is appearing on the pipe, or perhaps "old
> data" at a "new time."
> 
> 
> Have you gotten any more information from any cygwin folks about this
> "pipelines losing data" problem?  If not, feel free to forward this
> message to them.

James, 
you seem to be making several assumptions I'd like to correct.

1) that the cygwin developers were able to reproduce this problem. As
you know it only seems to occur on very select hardware, and we don't
have any. Unless it's trivial and obvious, no reproduce==no fix. This
point is the critical one. If someone offered to send me a Dell with the
failt, and said, I get a race on this machine, I'd be happy to have a
look. However I'm not going to buy a Dell just to investigate. 
2) We routinely ignore this mailing list, which exists for dicussing
such bugs! We always use the list to reply. In fact there are several
replies on the list archive page you reference. If you want to know
whether the cygwin folk have gotten back to him, you can ask 1 of 2 sets
of people - Russell, OR THE CYGWIN FOLK. Why didn't you just ask here?
3) That other users such as Russell desire direct responses to mailing
list questions. 
IMO it's bad netiquette to respond directly, when a post to the list
with the same information and reference would have gotten Russell (if
he's still subscribed, and if he's not - does he really wnat ot hear
about a problem that doesn't affect him anymore?). Russell didn't seem
to mind - but I knwo many folk that do. (Yeah, this point could be
thrown away I guess.... )

So here's your answer James:
The fault hasn't been explicitly identified and fixed. It may have been
fixed as part of other work going on in the cygwin1.dll, but we really
don't know if thats the case.

I suggest you 
a) try a developers snapshot. If that fixes the problem let us know. If
that doesn't fix it then 
b) grab the CVS source for cygwin, build a debug .dll and investigate.
If you don't know C++, or how to debug, then
c) Pay someone else to do it, or
d) learn how.

Now, listen carefully here.... Only you have the fault, only you can fix
it. We can and will help, in that we have written documentation on
building and debugging the cygwin1.dll - most of that is in the list
archives, and if you identify the culprit bit of code but don't know how
to do it better, we might have some ideas. We've even been known to send
patches for you to try. But what we are unable to do is infer the
trouble bit of code from the rather broad problem description that
currently exists.

Rob

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