Re: Problematic interpretion of paths starting with double slashes

["Sven Eden" <sven dot eden at gmx dot de>]

> Gesendet: Dienstag, 12. Juni 2018 um 19:56 Uhr
> Von: "Eric Blake" <eblake@redhat.com>
> On 06/12/2018 08:14 AM, Sven Eden wrote:
> 
> Good style is nice, but in my book, it is trumped by correct code.

Yeah. Point taken. :-D


> Hey, let's all assume good intent here. I did not mean what I wrote as
> an attack against you, nor am I accusing you of writing the said code,
> only that the code you are trying to use (shorthand "your code") is
> relying on something non-portable, and is therefore worth improving,
> regardless of whether Cygwin also makes a change. I apologize if my
> words have come across in a different tone than intended (email tends to
> be a lousy medium in that regards). And likewise, I'm not upset at your
> reaction to my words.

*sigh* ... you are absolutely correct of course.

In hindsight, I interpreted more into written words than was
available. I am sorry and apologize for being so "touchy". 


> >>> My question therefore is, whether the behavior can be gotten
> >>> nearer what every other GNU/Linux system does.
> >>> Maybe, if said first component can not be resolved as an smb
> >>> host, try an absolute path instead?
> >>
> >> That won't work as nicely as you want, because you will introduce long
> >> timeouts for every time that Cygwin first has to ascertain that '//tmp'
> >> does not exist as a remote host. Maybe we could indeed make '//tmp'
> >> resolve to '/tmp' if there is no remote '//tmp' available, but the speed
> >> penalties in doing so will not make it pleasant.
> >
> > The speed penalties would only apply if
> > a) "Something" looks up //foo/bar
> > b) "Something" made a mistake and actually wanted
> > /foo/bar
> >
> > So apart from the speed penalty that "Something" has to
> > suffer, and its their own damn fault, the only real
> > consequence would be that "Something" does not die from
> > ENOENT any more.
> 
> Indeed, and you may have a valid argument for making that change in
> Cygwin; patches are certainly welcome (that is, since //tmp is already
> implementation-defined behavior, we can define it to attempt to resolve
> to the remove host first, and on ENOENT then attempt to resolve it
> locally). It does have one potential minor drawback: right now, at
> least bash hard-codes the assumption that on Cygwin, //foo and //foo/
> resolve identically (that is, IF //foo exists, it necessarily behaves as
> a directory), using that assumption to reduce the need for network
> queries during certain forms of tab completion. If we add the fallback
> to trying /foo, that assumption is no longer always the case (it could
> be a regular file, symlink, socket, ...).

Hmm... that's a good point. So implemeting such a fallback
can only be done for anything that is at least "//foo/".


> > Am I right that the relevant stuff can be found in
> > winsup/cygwin?
> 
> Yes.

Then I'll add experimenting with that idea on my TODO list.


Thank you very much!


Regards

Sven

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