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Re: Which of cygwin32's design goals does ascii file conversion fulfil?


Larry Hall wrote:

> At 12:51 PM 10/23/98 -0700, David Fox wrote:
> >As I have noted before, there are two types of cygwin32 users, those
> >who are trying to make their Windows box feel more Unixy, and those
> >who are porting Unix code to Windows.  It seems to me that neither of
> >these groups has any need for DOS ``text mode'' conversion (where
> >lines are terminated by CR-LF.)  Why not make binary mode the one and

> >only default once and for all?--

The question as spelled out in the subject line is of course important. The
discussion of text vs. binary is not very productive, unless one states the
intention of providing the cygwin package.

I can see two camps around:
- those that want a Unix to run on the hardware that typically supports a
Windows system. But wouldn't it be better to go for a Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD
or something like that. I.e. a true Unix system

-those that want Unix functionality to gracefully coexist *and_cooperate*
with functionality provided by a Windows platform. This cannot be provided
by a Linux at al. solution

Cooperation between Unix functionality and Windows functionality has two
implications: (a) to be able to share data between these two goups of
functionalities (i.e. programs) without necessarily bothering about
representatiuonal issues, and (b) to be able to have programs of the
different groups interact "seamlessly".

Enforcing a binary approach to data in Cygwin applications would make it
difficult to fulfill either of these two goals. Imagine using Netscape as a
browser and wanting to have Cygwin-based applications handling some types of
documents. If such applications could directly handle native Windows
representations, it would make life much more simple.

My understanding has been that Cygwin tries to achieve the "peaceful
coexistence and cooperation" goal. If Cygwin tools require a full binary
mount, then we do have some problems in achieveing the goal.

So, what are the Cygwin design goals really? Are we hoping for something
that cannot be fulfilled?

Or is it, as some have suggested, not the design goals of the Cygwin
infrastructure that is limiting us. Is it the design goals of the tool
porters that might restrict us?

/olle


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