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Re: Add requirement for SYSTEMROOT to FAQ?
On Thu, Oct 07, 2004 at 07:07:23PM +0200, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>On Oct 7 10:52, Christopher Faylor wrote:
>> On Thu, Oct 07, 2004 at 10:20:53AM +0200, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>> >On Oct 6 21:53, Christopher Faylor wrote:
>> >> Or, even better yet, Corinna could we force SYSTEMROOT to be used
>> >> somehow but masked if someone removes it from the environment?
>> >
>> >Hmm, usually applications which suffer from a missing SYSTEMROOT are
>> >spawned by a parent process which has explicitely created a new
>> >environment block for the child and then calls execvp. So the new
>> >child is already missing SYSTEMROOT on process startup. What about
>> >always adding SYSTEMROOT to the windows env created in build_env,
>> >if it's missing?
>>
>> That's what I was thinking. And then lying about its existence if
>> someone queries the environment via getenv and SYSTEMROOT is "not
>> supposed to be there".
>>
>> What an amazingly lame requirement...
>
>Why is that a requirement anyway? Why is it necessary to hide
>$SYSTEMROOT? I don't see a reason for that?
I was talking about the need for SYSTEMROOT being lame.
I was theorizing that some program might become confused if it did
something like:
1) Wipe out everything from the environment
2) Check the environment
3) Hey! The environment isn't empty after I tried to empty it!
ABORT!!! ABORT!!! ABORT!!!
However, since cygwin is *already* trying to do the right thing with
SYSTEMROOT, and already keeps other things in the environment even after
someone says to nuke them, all that is required is a little extra
caching of the SYSTEMROOT environment variable.
That's how I was going to handle this.
cgf
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