Add requirement for SYSTEMROOT to FAQ?

[Christopher Faylor]

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

--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/