Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] TEST RELEASE: Cygwin 1.7.34-003 (Christmas/New Year release)

[Achim Gratz <Stromeko at nexgo dot de>]

Corinna Vinschen writes:
> The major change in this new release will be the new method to read
> account (passwd and group) information from the Windows user databases
> directly, without the requirement to generate /etc/passwd and /etc/group
> files to generate Unix-like uid and gid.

I've just set up a box with Win8.1 Core as a build machine.  I've used
the SAM desc schema and removed /etc/passwd and /etc/group and it works
great.


Here's one thing I still think warrants some improvement (in an AD
environment, at least):

Previously I've always used /etc/fstab.d/<user> for mounting the users'
home directory onto /home/<usr>.  That worked except for login via ssh
publickey since at the time ssh checks for the authorized keys that
mount isn't set up yet.  So I've copied those files into a different
directory and told sshd to look there, which means I had to set up each
user manually on the server.  I could now replace that mapping via AD,
but that would produce some rather unwieldy and long paths for certain
users.  So, instead of specifying the users' home directory directly I
would like to mount or auto-mount /home/<user> to the actual (network)
home directory.

Another thing is that the Cygwin home directory is always a
sub-directory of the windows home in our environment, so it would be
useful if there was a placeholder for the windows home directory (%H or
some such) for the /path override or even the schema entries to use.

> For your convenience I wrote new documentation.  Since this is a TEST
> prerelease, the new documentation is not part of the official docs yet.
> Rather have a look at
>
>   https://cygwin.com/preliminary-ntsec.html

> - When spawning a process under another user account, merge the user's
>   default Windows environment into the new process' environment.

I think this change pulls in additional environment variables with
windows path components when starting programs via cygserver/sshd that
are not a login shell (and perhaps when the user's login shell isn't
bash, so that profile doesn't get run), most notably PATH, TMP and TEMP.
If these variables are used later on by programs expecting a POSIX path
there, then things break.


Regards,
Achim.
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