New "feature" introduced with winsup automount?

[Christopher Faylor]

On Mon, Feb 15, 1999 at 02:39:45PM -0500, Steve Coleman wrote:
>Christopher Faylor wrote:
>> You deleted a registry entry???  Do you really think that is the
>> proscribed way of doing things?
>
>No, in fact I know that this is not the correct way to handle it. I was
>just trying to find out 'how it works' on my own without having to study
>all the latest source code changes (its all new to me). Often in the
>Windows environment the behavior of things like this can be tailored
>through the registry, I was just trying to see what it did. Sometimes
>when you live on the bleeding edge without documentation you have to
>take a little risk. :->

But if you're reporting your activities to the mailing list you do have
to bear a certain amount of responsibility.  You're now in the archives,
which means that it's possible that someone will think that the way
to deal with "automount problems" is to search the registry and delete
stuff.

>As a designer/developer of a large scale high-performance distributed
>processing system, cross platform portability is a big issue for me.
>In that respect I am _very_ impressed with the work that Cygnus has
>done so far.  I guess I just get a little antsy when I see behavior
>which I don't see in any of my many Unix environments.  My first goal
>is to understand why, my second is to learn how to deal with it.  I can
>certainly appreciate having an alternate way of mapping the drives into
>directories as I can see this being very useful in the Windows
>environment.  It's just that when I cd to a directory and 'pwd.exe',
>$cwd, nor '$PWD' agree with where I think I am, I can't help but
>wondering what scripts might break.

Well, of course you are not going to see anything like automounts in
UNIX.  And it is likely that you will see broken behavior in snapshots.
That's why snapshots are not releases.

>For instance, what if a script were used to move a series of directory
>structures by the following command:
>
> "tar - $PWD/$1 | rsh $host tar xvf -" 
>
>where the destination path "$host:/cygdrive/<drive>/<path>/$1" does not
>exist but "$host:/<path>/$1" did, and it was mounted from a different
>drive or even on a Unix system? 

Again.  You were using a snapshot that had some broken behavior.  You
can illustrate all sorts of problems with it, I'm sure.  It was broken!

>Q:Might this mapping also affect automated remote distribution programs
>like rsync and ftp as well?
>
>> >a2dslc:/c/Gnu/home/coleman:% ls -al //D/
>> >ls: //D/: No such file or directory
>> 
>> Ah.  Well, this probably explains things.  You're not using the latest
>> snapshot.  You're apparently using a snapshot from a week or so ago.
>
>Behind? Probably, it took me about a week (part time) to build the whole
>tree. There were a lot of  header files (or links to them) that did not
>seem to make it into the i686-pc-cygwin32 directory tree structure. I
>had to keep restarting the build after each minor correction. Now that
>I've done it once I'll try to keep it up to date. ;-)

Ok.  We've gotten to this point and you seem to understand but I'm going
to hammer it in again.

You were using an older snapshot.  The snapshot was broken.  You reported
that you were using the "latest" snapshot.  You were not.

The best way to find out what has changed is to look at the ChangeLog.  And,
until we write documentation, the best way to figure out what's going on in
the code is to read the ChangeLog and the code itself.

cgf