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RE: UNC and POSIX paths
- From: <gmt at malth dot us>
- To: <cygwin at cygwin dot com>
- Date: Mon, 17 Jun 2013 08:12:10 -0700
- Subject: RE: UNC and POSIX paths
- References: <003501ce6b5f$b41f2c10$1c5d8430$%fedin at samsung dot com> <kpn4kk$p88$1 at ger dot gmane dot org>
On Mon, 17 Jun 2013, at 06:57, Andrew DeFaria thusly quipped:
> On 06/17/2013 06:36 AM, Fedin Pavel wrote:
>> Hello!
>>
>> I decided to pay attention to one more problem. Lots of not very
>> well written configure scripts and makefiles like to access things
>> like '//usr/bin'. Under Cygwin this causes problem because Cygwin
>> treats '//' in Windows-style as access to network shares.
>> What if we change this ? We could have a mount entry, something like
'/unc'
>> (or /smb, /net, whatever) and access it like
'/smb/computername/sharename'.
>> I think this would improve POSIX compatibility a lot.
> Why not simply fix the "not very well written configure scripts and
makefiles"
> instead? BTW I've never come across a single one of those.
> Where are you getting yours?
Can't answer this offhand (aware you didn't ask me :P) but, under the
misguidance of PM's like Gentoo(portage) and rpm(build), when combined with
poorly and/or belligerently written packaging scripts, this can happen
incessantly. But that mostly only comes up when building Frankencygwins.
Sometimes you can fix it by forcing something like --prefix=///usr/local.
A CYGWIN env flag to disable UNC paths, or graft them somewhere other than
//, or an fstab-hack--basically anything allowing one to turn this feature
off--would be a moderate blessing for a small number (greater than or equal
to one) of people, but SHTDI, and this is endlessly proposed and
insta-shot-down.
At least one "merit-based" argument does recommend against implementing this
-- a great many configure scripts test for whether // == /, which means
packages could break if packagers happened to build while using the proposed
anti-feature-feature (the inevitable response being, "shouldn't those
packages just fix their broken configure scripts"? :P)
-gmt
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