cygdrive flags / hiding cygdrive prefix directory (the old behavior)

Igor Peshansky pechtcha@cs.nyu.edu
Wed Jun 14 20:40:00 GMT 2006


On Wed, 14 Jun 2006, kralius wrote:

> On 6/13/06, Brian Dessent <brian@XXXXXXX.XXX> wrote:

<http://cygwin.com/acronyms/#PCYMTNQREAIYR>.  Thanks.

> > > changed to become visible.  The cygwin installer now also creates a
> > > real directory on the windows file system called cygdrive,
> >
> > I don't know where you got this idea but it's absolutely not true.
> > There should never be a physical directory backing the cygdrive prefix,
> > and no package (and certainly not setup.exe) should ever create it.
> > Some users may create it to assist in tab-completion, but that is
> > something they would have done by hand.
>
> I agree that it shouldn't create this directory... But i have tried
> this a couple more times to verify.  If i only do a base install, it
> does not create a physical cygdrive directory, but if i install
> everything, it does.  (for reference, this is from a full download to
> disk on june 8, 2006 from the sourceware.mirrors.tds.net mirror).

If anything does this, it will probably be a postinstall script that
contains the string "cygdrive".  Grep through all .sh.done files in
/etc/postinstall, and you'll likely find the culprit.

> > This change was made in 1.5.19:
> > <http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-announce/2006-01/msg00016.html>.  It
> > was a change to the code in the DLL, and it has nothing to do with
> > flags in the mount table.
>
> Great!  This is what i was looking for.  Do you think anyone at cygwin
> would consider making this feature optional in a later release?

They will probably consider it and reject it.  The spirit of open-source
software is that you scratch what itches you, and others benefit.  This is
not something that itches any of the Cygwin developers.  Hence,
<http://cygwin.com/acronyms/#PTC>.

If you do plan to submit a patch, I suggest looking at the
fhandler_disk_file::readdir() function, and changing it to optionally
remove the virtual /cygdrive directory according to a new cygdrive flag
(and add a corresponding mount option).  That way, this behavior can be
controlled according to people's tastes.
	Igor
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