Re: cygwin PATH reorg?

[Chris Faylor <cgf at cygnus dot com>]

On Fri, Nov 19, 1999 at 11:42:29AM -0800, Earnie Boyd wrote:
>--- Chris Faylor <cgf@cygnus.com> wrote:
>>Given the number of problems that seem to crop up with people on the
>>cygwin mailing list, I was wondering if it made sense to have cygwin
>>probe the path list looking for the directory which is essentially
>>"/bin" and put this directory first in the PATH.
>>
>
>I certainly like the idea; but, this might cause more confusion than
>it's worth.
>
>>Finding this directory might be tricky, of course.  Especially if
>>someone has more than one cygwin installation on their hard disk.
>>However, we could even issue a warning if no cygwin 'bin' directory was
>>found.
>>
>>This could be defeatable by something like CYGWIN=nopathreorg .
>
>This would be a necessity for someone like myself that creates a /bin
>directory and moves only the essential binaries there, i.e.:
>cygwin1.dll, bash.exe, sh.exe, mount.exe, umount.exe, cygcheck.exe, and
>cygpath.exe (may have forgot something but not much).  I put the rest
>of the cygwin bin directory in /usr/bin.

I would think that everyone on this list would have CYGWIN=nopathreorg in
their environment from day one.  This could really add to the initial
startup time of the first CYGWIN process and *I* certainly wouldn't want
to be penalized.

This is the classic problem of trying to help the novice while not screwing
up the expert.  It might be overkill but I thought I'd throw it out anyway
to see what people thought.

cgf