[ANNOUNCEMENT] Public Cygwin 1.7 test starts today
Ken Brown
kbrown@cornell.edu
Fri Dec 12 14:45:00 GMT 2008
On 12/12/2008 9:31 AM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> On Dec 11 13:14, Ken Brown wrote:
>>
>> I think you forgot to mention the change to st_nlink [1], which will affect
>> some applications. For example, the kpathsea search library for texlive
>> needs to be patched to accommodate the change. (I've sent the patch to the
>> tlbuild list in case anyone is interested.) This might also apply to
>> cygwin's tetex package, but I haven't tested it.
>
> Yes, that's right. I forgot about that. I didn't know that more than
> just findutils and coreutils are affected. In theory, every tool
> should be able to deal with st_nlink == 1. It's not the right value
> for an emtpy dir, which would be 2, so any tool should check what's
> actually going on in that dir.
In the case of kpathsea, the program was deliberately relying on
st_nlink to speed up searching on systems that it viewed as "unix-like",
including cygwin. [It didn't check for subdirectories unless st_nlink >
2.] Fortunately, this was documented, and it was easy to make a
configuration change to tell it to exclude cygwin for this purpose. I
don't know how likely it is that other applications will similarly cut
corners.
Ken
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