Re: Cygwin and Interix interoperability?

[mwoehlke <mwoehlke-nospam at tibco dot com>]

Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> We're already having two different symlink types, one of them U/Win
> compatible.  I'm, too, not really interested in adding another one(*),
> especially when there's no documentation and, TTBOMK, no Win32 API.

True; it might require linking against Interix (yuck), which is only
feasible with SUA 5.2. There is nevertheless a very real chance that I
will look into this, as this would be really useful for me, as most of
the files I work with exist on NFS.

Even better, believe it or not, the Windows subsystem actually
understands them! Which actually means that they are currently invisible
to Cygwin. If Cygwin could make these, then they would be understood
*transparently* by the rest of Windows (on NFS volumes, anyway)!

> Same for the SFU NFS permission handling which doesn't seem to work
> transparently using the Win32 security API.

I would assume that there is a different interface for NFS permissions,
as they show up in Explorer on an 'NFS Attributes' tab (which, however,
means that at some level they are accessible to normal Windows
applications; even SFU ones where mixed-mode is not supported). It a
different way, IMO this is /more/ worth looking into because one could
argue that you're "reducing" complexity rather than adding it.

> (*) We will probably start using the new symlink API of Windows Longhorn/
>     Vista at one point when the first non-beta release of Vista is
>     available.  This is hopefully compatible with existing file systems
>     like SFU NFS...[snip]

I would HOPE it's compatible with NFS!

Anyway, it seems obvious that whatever I want to happen here, I have to
do myself. Hopefully 'PTC' will still apply. :-)

(Hopefully this isn't a double-post, either; I seem to have munged the 
'To:' last time.)

--
Matthew
"Ethics? We've heard of it" -- Microsoft


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