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Re: Symlinks under /proc
On Mon, 31 Jan 2005, Christopher Faylor wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 31, 2005 at 09:04:57PM +0100, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> >On Jan 31 12:43, Igor Pechtchanski wrote:
> >> D'oh! After all this thought process, I looked on Linux, and that's
> >> *exactly* how /dev/std* are implemented there. On the one hand, it shows
> >> that my brain still works (surprisingly). On the other, it proves yet
> >> again that a few months in the laboratory can usually save a few hours in
> >> the library.
> >> Igor (properly ashamed)
> >> P.S. Can those symlinks be added via the same mechanism as the /proc/self
> >> symlink, or should base-files do it?
> >
> >I would prefer something in base-files. The problem with adding a
> >virtual file system handler for /dev is that it's not a R/O FS as /proc.
> >If we add a R/O /dev handler, nobody would be able to add own symlinks
> >like `ln -s /dev/nst0 /dev/tape'.
> >
> >On the same line, does base-files already create empty /dev and /proc
> >directories? No, apparently not. Adding these empty directories would
> >helps a lot for file completion.
>
> Have we reached the point yet where we can just get rid of special /dev
> handling entirely? Maybe we could just add /dev population to setup.exe
> or even have cygwin1.dll itself run a program if it detects an unpopulated
> /dev, sort of like how udev is handled in linux now.
>
> My only reservation with doing things this way is that we'd be making
> cygwin perform a disk lookup every time someone wanted to get to open
> /dev/tty.
I thought I posted a script earlier that would create/populate /dev with
the latest files. The decision was to not add it to base-files since
mknod() was "almost ready" and we could switch to /dev being a real
directory with real device files. Since this hasn't happened yet, let's
add that script to base-files for now and be done with it.
FWIW, I don't see a reason to do this in the DLL.
Perhaps we should move this discussion to cygwin-apps?
Igor
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