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Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] Public Cygwin 1.7 test starts today


On Dec 12 09:44, Ken Brown wrote:
> 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.

I don't think it's the right way to special case this for Cygwin in
kpathsea.  This isn't exactly a Cygwin issue.  The right thing to do
would be to change the test in a generic fashion from

  if (st_nlink > 2)

to

  if (st_nlink != 2)


Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Project Co-Leader          cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat

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