[HEADSUP] Let's start a Cygwin 1.7 release area

Igor Peshansky pechtcha@cs.nyu.edu
Mon Apr 14 23:24:00 GMT 2008


On Sat, 12 Apr 2008, Brian Dessent wrote:

> Unresolved issues with this plan:
>
> - What are we going to do about text/binary mode?  To maintain the
> setting, setup would have to be taught to parse/write fstab.  Ugh.  Plan
> B would be to say that if you want textmode you have to edit fstab
> yourself.  That has the advantage of making it harder to use textmode,
> which leads to fewer bugreports.  On the other hand, the small army of
> insane people that do actually use textmode will probably be mad that
> they have to manually edit config files (the horror!) because the setup
> tool no longer has a choice.

Hmm.  Even now, one does not have to edit the registry to switch from
binary mode to text mode -- you just need to re-mount with the appropriate
option.  I assume the same will hold for the /etc/fstab approach.  It
might make it easier if mount understood absolute POSIX paths as well
(i.e., "mount -t /etc/text /etc/text" should work).

If we taught mount to do this now and removed the "Text" option from setup
altogether, complainers could be directed to the mount manpage.  Then
switching to the new setup won't be that much of a pain (at least in the
text/binary department).

> - Do we really want to pick a new key for $newkey, or wedge it into the
> same existing location somehow?  I admit that I do find it a bit silly
> that Cygwin still installs under "Cygnus Solutions", and since a 1.7 DLL
> will not even look at the registry I guess it is proper to move to a
> totally new key for this setting.  And of course for the 1.7 testing
> period we'd want it to be separate.  But I mean long term, are we making
> 3rd parties lives easier or harder by having two totally different
> places/formats to check for an existing install of Cygwin?

I agree that naming the new key "Cygnus Solutions" is silly, beyond
certain nostalgic value.

But one thing to consider is that by adding a registry key, we're setting
things up for one dominant installation of Cygwin.  So people juggling
multiple installations really *will* have to go edit the registry to
switch -- no more nice "mount -m" approach, since the mounts will no
longer apply anyway.

Also, things like heap_chunk_in_mb currently live in the registry.  Will
they stay there?  Will we instead have /etc/cygwinopts (or move it to
$CYGWIN)?
	Igor
-- 
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